MRISTIAN MARRIAGE
KHensley Henson,D.D.
Utfe
CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
(Efjrtsttan Htfe
THE series of volumes of which this is one
has for its object the stimulating, guiding
and strengthening of the Christian Life.
It has been prepared, not to advocate
the views of any special school of religious
thought, but to set forth in the light of
the latest knowledge and experience, the
practical duties which belong to all who
profess the Christian name.
Each volume will be brief, and will be
divided into short chapters easily read by
busy people.
The following are the first tivo volumes
of the series : —
CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE.
By Canon Hensley Henson.
SOCIAL LIFE. By the Dean
of Carlisle.
Other volumes of this series by the
Bishop of RIPON, the Bishop of DURHAM,
the Bishop of CARLISLE and the Rev. Dr.
A. W. ROBINSON are in preparation.
CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
BY
H. HENSLEY HENSON, B.D.
Hon. D.D. Glasgow
Canon of Westminster
REGIS
BIBL. MAJ.
COLLEGE
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED
LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND MELBOURNE
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PREFACE
No questions are in themselves of greater
importance, and none more difficult to answer
wisely, than those which are connected with
the institution of marriage. On the one hand,
they affect the large, complicated and ramify
ing interests of property, for all rules of
succession must be based on the principles
which determine legitimacy. On the other
hand they affect, and that in the most manifest
and vital degree, the morals of the community,
for the sexual relationship itself is regulated
either for good or for evil by the Marriage Law.
Morality stands in the closest connection
with religion, and the Church hardly less than
the State is interested in the rules which
determine the conditions under which the
marriage union is created and cancelled.
Social stability is not to be severed from
domestic purity, and this depends on the
vi PREFACE
standard of marital fidelity which is main
tained among the citizens. Family discipline
determines, more largely than any other factor,
public morality; nothing can take the place
of home influence in the shaping of character,
and this influence is plainly dependent on the
view which husband and wife take of their
union.
It will not be disputed that the importance
of the questions raised by the statesman, the
social student and the Christian moralist in
connection with marriage is equalled by their
difficulty. And this difficulty is gravely en
hanced by the circumstance that too generally
it is not sufficiently recognised. There are
fanatics on both sides of the standing conflict
between Church and State who apply the
simple logic of fanaticism to the problem of
marriage, and avoid by ignoring the questions
which none the less must ultimately be
answered. That marriage is a contract, and
therefore from first to last the creature of the
law, is the assumption on the one side; that
PREFACE vii
marriage is a sacrament, and therefore deter
mined by a higher authority than that of the
State, is the assumption of the other.
Divorce is mere matter of expediency,
regulated by statute, to the first. Divorce is
divinely prohibited and therefore outside the
range of any human authorisation to the last.
It is sufficiently obvious that between these
positions there can be no harmony. One must
prevail over the other.
In this little book an attempt is made to
indicate the elements which must combine in
a doctrine of Christian marriage, and therefore
must direct the course of a Christian citizen
through the difficult discussions of the practical
issues concerned. I have not thought it well
to embark on such questions of immediate
concern as the revision of the Tables of Kindred
and Affinity now apparently contemplated by
Parliament, nor have I entered on the exasper
ating subject of clerical duty in the matter of
remarrying divorced persons. These topics
seemed to be unsuitable for so brief a treatment
viii PREFACE
as alone would be possible in a small book.
But I have indicated, not obscurely, that I do
not think these practical questions can rightly
or reasonably be answered by direct appeals
to the Bible or the Church. The Christian
law of marriage must beyond all question find
its principles in the teaching of Jesus Christ,
and its exposition within the Christian society,
but the application of evangelical principles
will not be learned from the pages of the New
Testament, nor may the witness of the Church
be^ safely identified with ecclesiastical pre
cedents and decisions in former times.
The relations of Church and State, not
merely in that comparatively trivial version
of them which is known as " Establishment/'
but in that larger and more complicated view
which includes the whole contact of religion
and society, require imperatively at the
present time a thorough examination. No
thoughtful citizen will contemplate without
deep misgivings the alienation from the State
of the moral force embodied in the Church,
PREFACE ix
and no reflective Christian will lightly esteem
the misfortunes inherent in a deliberate and
sustained divergence of principle between the
New Testament and the Statute Book. All
must see how gravely the course of social
development is affecting public morals.
Good citizens, as such, can combine in the
effort to preserve the moral heritage of the
State, and to bring to the solemn and difficult
work of government all the moral forces of the
nation. As a first step in such combination
there is need that some agreement should
be reached as to the principles at stake, the
claims on either side which are irreducible, the
necessary conditions of co-operation. If I
have succeeded in stating the problem from
the Christian point of view my purpose has
been secured.
H. HENSLEY HENSON.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE ........ v
CHAP.
I. THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF THE JEWISH
PEOPLE IN THE TIME OF CHRIST . i
II. THE TEACHING OF CHRIST . .22
III. THE TEACHING OF ST. PAUL . . 49
IV. MARRIAGE WITHIN THE CHURCH BEFORE THE
REFORMATION . . -77
V. EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION ON MARRIAGE 100
VI. CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE UNDER MODERN CON
DITIONS OF LIFE ... .123
CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
CHAPTER I
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF THE JEWISH
PEOPLE IN THE TIME OF CHRIST
THE religion of Christ took its rise in Palestine
nearly nineteen hundred years ago, and at the
first it clearly stood in the most intimate
relation to the established Church of the
Jewish people. Fulfilment, not destruction,
was the avowed object of the Founder; and,
as well by example as by precept, He dis
allowed the notion that any violent breach
with the existing system was contemplated.
He claimed to stand in line with the long
succession of the Hebrew prophets; His
ministry was the completion, and therefore
the verification, of theirs. He was an obedient
member of the Jewish Church, " born under
2 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
the law," and He expressly commanded His
followers to recognise the official authority of
the " Scribes and Pharisees " who " sate in
Hoses' seat." To the canonical Scriptures of
His nation Christ was accustomed to turn for
the sustenance of His own religious life, for
the elucidation of His teaching, and for the
proof of His claims. From the Founder
Himself, therefore, the Christian Church in
herited a reverential attitude towards the
system of Israel.
It follows that the starting-point of every
attempt to appraise the teaching of Christ
must be an examination of the doctrine and
practice of the Jewish Church to which He
belonged. Underlying the Gospels everywhere
is the current Judaism of the time ; the maxims
of Christ pre-suppose both a theology and a
morality, and they can only then be justly
appreciated when they are considered in
connection with the complete mass of ecclesi
astical doctrine and practice which they
confirmed, or disallowed, or corrected. This
IN THE TIME OF CHRIST 3
general consideration is particularly relevant
to a discussion of the Christian doctrine of
marriage. We must start by attempting to
recover the view of marriage which obtained
in Palestine in the time of Christ.
It goes without saying that the Jews based
their practice on the Scriptures of the Old
Testament, and therein principally on the
legislation of the Pentateuch. The legislation
was regarded as the work of the Law-giver,
Moses, and its character as a gradual modifica
tion of existing practice was not recognised.
Thus injustice was done to the legislation itself,
and a grave difficulty in the development of
morals was created.
Viewed historically, the laws contained in
the Pentateuch represent a moral advance, for
they correct and mitigate a traditional practice
which was in many respects barbarous and
immoral. So far we may fairly claim that
they form part of the great process of education
effected through the Prophets, but the fact that
that process was gradual and progressive
4 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
prohibited the competence of those laws for
the functions which the Rabbis attributed to
them.
There is an old proverb that " the good is
enemy of the best/' and the history of the
Mosaic law provides a striking illustration of
its truth. Relatively good the laws were;
but they soon fell behind the prophetic
conscience, and came to represent an inferior
and discarded morality. At the time when
Christ fulfilled His ministry there was a wide
gulf between the morals of the earlier books
of the Old Testament and the accepted moral
standard of the Jewish people, but the exist
ence of this gulf was screened by the hedge of
superstitious reverence with which the sacred
literature was surrounded. The Old Testa
ment was, of course, read in a temper of
unquestioning acceptance, and although it
was not possible even so to evade the grand
and pervading conflict between the primitive
ideas illustrated by patriarchal practice, and
incorporated in the Mosaic law on the one hand
IN THE TIME OF CHRIST 5
and the prophetic teaching, which from the
earliest times attempted the correction of
those ideas, on the other, yet the difficulty of
reconciling the two was limited to individual
thinkers, or gave employment to the specula
tive casuistry of the Rabbinic schools, rather
than disturbed the general mind or affected
the general practice.
Probably we may say that the practice was
superior to the theory of marriage. Theoretic
ally the Jews, who were the contemporaries of
Christ, were polygamists. As disciples of
Moses they could be nothing else. The study
of their sacred literature confirmed them in a
theoretical acceptance of polygamy; and the
strong continuous influence of human depravity
always secured a certain amount of poly
gamous practice. Herod the Great had no
less than ten wives, and though this was
regarded as unusual yet it was admittedly
lawful. Indeed, the Rabbis, following their
favourite method of giving precise shape to
everything, laid it down that eighteen wives
6 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
were permitted to a king, though to a private
man not more than four or five.*
The facility of divorce was very great, for
the reigning school of casuists gave the widest
interpretation to the ambiguous phrase in the
book of Deuteronomy, to which all agreed to
appeal. When, as we shall see presently, our
Lord decided in favour of the more rigorous
view, His words caused astonishment and even
consternation among His hearers. "If the
case of the man is so with his wife," they said,
" it is not expedient to marry." We could
not have a more impressive indication of the
depravation of the theory of marriage in the
common view. Of Hillel's teaching it would
hardly be excessive to say in the words of
Gibbon that " the most tender of human
connections was degraded to a transient society
of profit or pleasure."
There existed, however, two powerful influ
ences which tended to correct the practice of
* See Schiirer, "Jewish People in Time of Jesus Christ," div. i.
vol. i. p. 455 (note)
IN THE TIME OF CHRIST 7
religious Jews, and it cannot be doubted that
these operated with such effect that the
polygamous theory was, in the case of the most
part of the people, disregarded, and practically
the Jews of Christ's time were monogamists.
In the first place, marriage amongst the Jews
had run the same course as among the rest of
mankind, and that course had been steadily
in the direction of monogamy; the accumu
lated experience of the race everywhere
crystallised itself in a practical acceptance of
monogamous marriage. Polygamy was but
a survival from a distant and primitive phase
of social development, and its disappearance
was one of the best-assured consequences of
social advance.
" While Hebrew society in Old Testament times
represents an advanced stage in the evolutionary scheme,
viz. that in which polygyny and paternal government
are the dominant forms, the Old Testament literature
has nevertheless been largely drawn upon in the dis
cussion, on the ground that it embodies survivals from
the diverse customs of prehistoric times." *
One conspicuous instance may be noted.
* See Hastings' " Dictionary of the Bible," vol. iii. p. 263.
8 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
It is related in the Gospel that the Sadducees
challenged our Lord on the question of what
is called Levirate marriage, that is, the
marriage of a childless brother's widow by
his next brother. This marriage, illustrated
by a repulsive narrative in the book of Genesis,
and formally ordered in the book of Deuter
onomy, appears to have been theoretically
part of the current Jewish law in the time of
Christ. The Sadducees professed, perhaps with
truth, to adduce an actual case. " There were
with us seven brethren." Yet the Levirate
law ran so counter to civilised sentiment that
even the Rabbis appear to have disputed as
to the obligation of the Mosaic rule. It was
long the practice of Christian divines to attempt
to explain away what they supposed to be a
peculiarity of Hebrew law by some special
hypothesis. Even writers who, like the present
Dean of Lichfield, are aware of the widely-
extended character of the practice, yet deem
it necessary to argue that " God, Who
made the law, might suspend the incestuous
IN THE TIME OF CHRIST 9
character of it," and that it was admitted
into the divinely - inspired code "under
special and exceptional circumstances, as
part of concessive and temporary legisla
tion."*
It is not necessary to have recourse to any
such expedients when once we remember
that the experience of Israel was not other
than that of the rest of mankind, that the
Levirate-marriage was once common every
where, and that everywhere for the same
reasons it has fallen into disrepute and disuse.
The circumstance that the literature of Israel
came to have a sacred character, and that a
mechanical theory of inspiration clothed that
literature with an irrational, because an
indiscriminating, sanctity explains the fact
that a relic of primitive barbarism survived
into the age of civilisation, and drew to itself
the anxious regard of civilised and religious
men. How barbarous the practice really is
becomes apparent when it is considered in the
* See Luckock, " History of Marriage," p. 248.
io CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
light of the ideas which determined it. Dr.
Driver writes:
"The institution of the Levirate-marriage, it is prob
able, originated in a state of society in which the con
stituent units were, more largely than with us, not single
families, but groups of related families, or joint family
groups. In primitive and semi-primitive societies women
do not possess independent rights, they are treated as
part of the property of the family to which they belong.
A married woman, upon the death of her husband,
passes consequently, with her children and her late
husband's estate, to the new head of the family, who
assumes in relation to them the same rights and duties
which the husband had : he holds towards them the
joint position of guardian and owner; and this brings
with it as a corollary the right to treat the widow as his
wife. And it is the brother who thus becomes the de
ceased man's heir, because, from his age and position,
he is (as a rule) the person who is best fitted to be the
new head of the family and the guardian of its interests
and rights." *
The Hebrew institution, then, is not to be
separated from its place in the general history
of human civilisation; nor are we under any
reasonable necessity to read into it any other
notions than those which that place suggests.
It emerges in the Old Testament like a piece
* See " Deuteronomy," p. 284 [International Critical Com
mentary.]
IN THE TIME OF CHRIST n
of the virgin rock which may be seen obtruding
even in the busy thoroughfares of a modern
Scandinavian city. All the evidences of
culture and progress are around it, but it tells
a story of far-distant days when the red
granite stood out bleak and naked to the
northern storms. The consecration in Israel
of a whole national literature created many
moral and social problems when the nation
had outgrown its primitive conditions and
looked back with perplexity on sacred pre
cedents, which none the less offended the
conscience. Polygamy and the Levirate-
marriage were instances of such sacred but
unsatisfactory precedents.
In the next place, there had been operative
in Israel from very early times another
influence, that of the prophets, which some
times as in this case worked in the same
direction with the general tendency, and some
times worked in a diverse direction altogether.
Now the later prophets were consistently
monogamists. Partly, their relatively intense
12 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
individualism rebelled against the primitive
treatment of women as rather chattels than
persons; partly their lofty conception of the
divine character rendered them increasingly
insistent that no conduct could be fitting in
man which ran counter to the righteousness
of his Creator. The prophets were also poets,
and they invested the marriage-relationship
with the moral dignity which made it the
favourite and most eloquently suggestive
symbol of Israel's relation to Jehovah. And
when once they had established that train of
religious associations in connection with
marriage, polygamy was in every devout
Israelite's mind bound up with polytheism
and stricken with the fatal character of
apostasy. Jehovah is represented as Israel's
husband; the worship of other gods is a
violation of the marriage covenant, devotion
to Jehovah alone is as the chastity and faith
fulness of a pure wife.
This conception is found in the writings of
Hosea, where indeed it appears to have its
IN THE TIME OF CHRIST 13
source in the unhappy domestic experience of
the prophet himself. His own wife had
proved an adulteress, and his children were
born in adultery. The anguish which he had
felt opened to him a new and profounder
knowledge of the true gravity of the national
sin. He discovered the intrinsic force and
grandeur of his love for his faithless wife when
he learned her falseness, and inevitably he
carried into his theology the noblest version
he could frame of human character. He could
ask with the poet:
" Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate
gift,
That I doubt His own love can compete with it ? Here
the parts shift?
Here, the creature surpass the Creator, — the end, what
began? "
and his answer could not but be the same.
His own love for the shameless Gomer, the
daughter of Diblaim, was in its generosity and
persistence but a faint picture of the long-
suffering and munificent love of Jehovah for
His unthankful people. So the prophet wakes
14 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
his own private disaster an instrument of
spiritual witness.
" And the Lord said unto me, Go yet, love a woman
beloved of her friend and an adulteress. Even as the
Lord loveth the children of Israel, though they turn
unto other gods." *
A later prophet, the author of the latter part
of Isaiah, adopts the same moving and
suggestive thought when he thus consoles
the captive nation:
" Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither
be thou confounded ; for thou shalt not be put to shame :
for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and the
reproach of thy widowhood shalt thou remember no
more. For thy Maker is thine husband: the Lord of
Hosts is his name: and the Holy One of Israel is thy
Redeemer: the God of the whole earth shall he be
called. For the Lord hath called thee as a wife forsaken
and grieved in spirit, even a wife of youth when she is
cast off, saith thy God." j
And again in another place the prophet
writes :
"Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken: neither
shall thy land any more be termed Desolate : but thou
shalt be called Hephzi-bah, and thy land Beulah: for
* Hosea iii. i. f Isaiah liv. 4-6.
IN THE TIME OF CHRIST 15
the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be mar
ried. For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall
thy sons marry thee: and as the bridegroom rejoiceth
over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee." *
The prophet Malachi emphasises the duty
of faithfulness to the marriage bond not only
by adducing the divine hatred of all treachery,
but also by representing that Jehovah Himself
is the witness to the marriage covenant. The
contempt with which the offerings of the Jews
were received had its explanation, according
to this prophet, in the moral fault of the
worshippers. To their question why their
service was unacceptable he answers thus:
" Because the Lord hath been witness between thee
and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt
treacherously, though she is thy companion, and the
wife of thy covenant. . . . Therefore take heed to your
spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife
of his youth. For I hate putting away, saith the Lord,
the God of Israel, and him that covereth his garment
with violence, saith the Lord of Hosts: therefore take
heed to your spirit, that ye deal not treacherously." f
Malachi, as afterwards our Lord, refers to
* Isaiah Ixii. 4, 5. f Malachi ii. 14-16.
16 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
the narrative of the Creation as proving the
duty of marital faithfulness.
When the famous declaration was added to
the record in Genesis cannot be determined,
but at least we may be sure that it represents
a prophetic handling of the primitive material
designed to correct current practice in the
direction of monogamy. " The primitive
Hebrew tradition," observes Bishop Ryle,
" is made, through the Divine Spirit, the first
step in the stairway of Divine Revelation."*
Historically the order of moral attainment
was otherwise. Man did not begin with
monogamy, but reached that stage of moral
advance by a long and gradual progress; but
monogamy did represent the true demands of
human nature in this particular of sexual
intercourse, and therefore was fitly set in the
forefront of the prophetic version of human
origins as indicating, in advance of the history,
the ideal which would determine its course.
Read as record of fact, the narrative may be
See " Early Narratives of Genesis," p. 29.
IN THE TIME OF CHRIST 17
actually, from the point of view of the modern
student, grotesque ; read as symbolising funda
mental truth, it is precious and illuminating
still.
No help meet for man can be found in all the
circuit of created life outside the sphere of
humanity itself. Fundamental equality of
nature must condition sexual union, and not
less must determine the intimacy and per
manence of that union. " The man said,
This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my
flesh: she shall be called woman, because she
was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man
leave his father and his mother, and shall
cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one
flesh/' The prophetic teaching, then, had
checked, and to a great extent corrected, the
tendency of the law and the history to per
petuate, under sacred sanctions, a properly
obsolete type of marriage.
It must be added that the circumstances of
the nation in the period preceding the advent
of Christ had contributed to the same result
i8 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
by bringing the Jews into closer relation with
the rest of mankind. The Greeks and Romans
were monogamists, and the Jews of the dis
persion were, in spite of themselves, compelled
to mitigate their provincialism in many
respects. The sexual licence of the Grseco-
Roman world was, indeed, truly repugnant to
the best instincts of a race which treasured the
pure teachings of the prophets, but in the
particular matter of polygamy the Jews were
probably assisted by the influence of their
Gentile neighbours to escape in practice from
a vicious theory. Dr. Edersheim writes :
" The readers of the New Testament cannot but feel
that the relations there indicated proceed upon the
assumption that monogamy was the rule, and polygamy
the exception. The permission of polygamy, and the
comparative facility of obtaining a divorce, may seem
to militate against the fundamental idea of the marriage
relation. But against these drawbacks we have to put
the two indubitable facts, that generally men were only
united in wedlock to one wife, and that Jewish females
occupied not only a comparatively but an absolutely
high position. The law throughout recognised and pro
tected the rights of women, and discouraged the practice
of polygamy. An impartial reader cannot rise from the
perusal, not of a few isolated passages, but of the sections
IN THE TIME OF CHRIST 19
of the Mishna bearing upon this subject, without being
impressed with this conviction." *
It does not appear that Christ ever came
intp contact with any other marriage law or
practice than those which obtained in Palestine,
and accordingly He never encountered the
gross licence of the Graeco-Roman world.
Very early in the experience of the Church,
however, the practical questions implied in
the theory and practice of marriage were
raised outside the pale of Judaism, and the
Apostles found themselves compelled to apply
the principles of the Gospel under novel
circumstances. We shall find that this ap
plication was by no means easy or altogether
successful. For outside the Jewish sphere
there were absent the presuppositions of a
sound marriage law. Christ could take for
granted the prophetic teaching, and He could
appeal with the assurance of success to the
Scriptures against the relatively debased
standard of Rabbinic morality.
* See " History of the Jewish Nation," p. 272.
20 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
In point of fact there does not appear to
have been any great or continued difficulty
within the Jewish-Christian churches in
securing a satisfactory practice in the matter
of marriage; but it was far otherwise in the
case of the Gentile churches. When we pass
from the Gospels to the Pauline Epistles we
are conscious of a great change in the moral
atmosphere. Behind our Lord's teaching
there is a moral background essentially
Christian; behind the Pauline Epistles there
is a background of moral confusion definitely
pagan. Accordingly there is a suggestive
absence of direct legislation in practical morals
in the one case, and an equally suggestive
abundance of it in the other.
Our Lord's pronouncements on the subject
of marriage are, indeed, as coming from Him,
of supreme importance, but they do not carry
the question beyond the point at which the
prophet Malachi had left it, and, indeed, there
was no need that they should. He adopts
the prophetic point of view, adds the
IN THE TIME OF CHRIST 21
sanction of His divine authority to the
prophetic teaching, and inaugurates an epoch
of moral progress under the control of His
Gospel, which, by slow but advancing stages,
would raise the institution of marriage to an
altitude of purity and moral power which
neither the Jewish nation nor the ancient
world could imagine.
CHAPTER II
THE TEACHING OF CHRIST
WHEN we seek to ascertain the actual teaching
of our Lord on the subject of marriage we find
ourselves confronted with some grave diffi
culties. It is very important that these
should be seriously considered, for they dis
allow many natural and attractive miscon
ceptions. There are, then, three broad
conditions which determine our knowledge
of the mind of Christ on this and other matters.
In the first place we can never wisely or
rightly forget that we possess the tradition of
the Master's teaching in documents which,
though generally trustworthy, are not actually
contemporary or first-hand authorities. Christ
Himself wrote nothing: two of our four
Gospels are admittedly not the work of
Apostles; and neither of the others is certainly
22
TEACHING OF CHRIST 23
Apostolic. We are fairly justified by the facts
disclosed and appraised by critical scholars
in believing that the account of the life and
teaching of our Lord, and the broad lines of
His character, are faithfully given in the four
Gospels, but our reasonable assurance does
not extend to an exact knowledge of the very
words of Christ, nor are we able to escape from
a large measure of uncertainty as to His actual
teaching.
Thus it happens that we are rarely able to
adduce the supreme authority of Christ in the
discussion of any question of practical morals.
The principles of His religion are clearly stated,
and therefore we have in the Gospels the
postulates of a sound handling of practical
questions, but direct pronouncements on
practical problems are few, if indeed it can be
said that any exist at all, and we abuse the
Gospels to our own hurt if we treat them as
legislative codes, or as casuistical treatises.
Even in the crucial matter of marriage we
shall find that our Lord's recorded teaching is
24 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
not free from ambiguity. Either the different
statements of the Evangelists are not wholly
harmonious, or the text of the crucial passages
is uncertain, or, finally, the passages themselves
are capable of more than one rendering.
In the next place we have to remember
that we are living under circumstances extra
ordinarily remote from those which conditioned
the teachings of Christ — so far, I mean, as His
teachings must be supposed so to have been
conditioned. We cannot fairly separate His
pronouncements on marriage from the situa
tion, social and political, which originally
called them forth. Take for example Christ's
prohibition of divorce, either absolute, if we
accept the version of His words given by St.
Mark and St. Luke, or with the single exception
of adultery if we prefer that given by St.
Matthew. Can we simply carry over the words
of the Gospel without explanation to the con
ditions of our own time? " There is danger
of making marriage too difficult," said a very
wise Christian bishop — Phillips Brooks. His
TEACHING OF CHRIST 25
biographer extracts from the Bishop's note
book the following suggestive passage, which
will serve to illustrate the present argument:
" The ' putting away ' which Christ condemned was
not the equivalent of our present divorce system; it
was purely arbitrary, with no trial or opportunity of
defence, the man's right only, while the woman had no
corresponding power; it was originally for some cause
which includes more than adultery, and it allowed re
marriage (Deut. xxiv. 2). Our divorce is a different
matter, involving different necessities. The Mosaic
institution which Christ modified had reference to in
heritance and preservation of purity of descent. There
are strong objections to using the Holy Communion for
enforcing a position on this subject, especially in the
matter of its administration to the dying, in view of the
perfect conscience with which divorces are obtained.
It would be more consistent to deny divorce altogether.
But the whole question is not a clear one, in view of the
fact that Christian nations have so differed regarding it,
and so differ still. Circumstances have changed since
the time of Christ. The spirit is more than the letter." *
Without question there is much force in
such contentions. The existence of a careful
and legal regulation of marriage in all its
bearings is a fact which bears plainly on the
practical application of Christ's words, and
* See " Life of Phillips Brooks," vol. ii. p. 720.
26 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
especially since this regulation has been the
work of the Christian State. In view of our
Lord's doctrine about the State, and ©f His
recognition of the legitimacy of the Mosaic
legislation as a necessary concession to the
hardness of men's hearts, it is much to be
considered whether His declarations about
marriage ought to be applied without many
modifications to the circumstances of the
modern world.
A representative example of the teaching
which I deprecate as implying an indefensible
handling of the Gospel is provided in Bishop
Gore's deservedly popular exposition of the
Sermon on the Mount. The passage runs
thus:
" Our Lord proclaimed, as a prominent law of His
new kingdom, the indissolubility of marriage. And for
us as Christians it is perfectly plain that not all the
parliaments or kings on earth can alter the law of our
Lord. And if any ministers of Christ, or persons claiming
to represent the Church of Christ, ever dare to let the
commandment of men, in however high places, override
the law of Christ, they are simply behaving in a way
which brings them under the threat which our Lord so
solemnly uttered : ' Whosoever shall be ashamed of me
TEACHING OF CHRIST 27
and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation,
the Son of Man also shall be ashamed of him, when He
cometh in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.'
Beyond all question for the Church, and for all who
desire to call themselves Christians, it is absolutely out
of the question to regard those as married who, having
been divorced, have been married again contrary to the
law of Christ, during the lifetime of their former partner.
It is quite true that this indissolubility of marriage may
press hardly upon individuals in exceptional cases. But
so does every law which is for the welfare of mankind in
general: and, press it hardly or softly, the words of our
Lord are quite unmistakable. He who refused to legis
late on so many subjects legislated on this, and the
simple question arises whether we prefer the authority
of Christ to any other authority whatever." *
The attentive reader will detect a fallacy in
the different senses of the crucial word " law."
The "law" of Christ's kingdom is a moral
principle; the c<law" which " the parliaments
or kings on earth" can alone " alter " is a
statute of the realm. They do not " override
the law of Christ " when, following the
example of Moses, which Christ certainly
sanctioned, they recognise " the hardness of
men's hearts" as a reason for permitting in
* Page 69 f.
28 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
the mixed society for which they legislate a
lower standard of marital obligation than the
ideal. The legitimacy of their action must
depend on the adequacy of their plea of
expediency. They do not claim to legislate
for Christians as such, but for citizens, who
may, or may not, be Christians. Re-marriage
after divorce is so far from being disallowed
by Christ that, in the only case of divorce
which He contemplates, it must be assumed
as permissible, since divorce apart from liberty
of re-marriage was unknown to His contem
poraries. Moreover, it is an abuse of language,
unintentional but none the less grave, to apply
to Christ's teaching in the Sermon on the
Mount the name and character of " legisla
tion" in the political sense of the word.
Bishop Gore himself recognises this earlier in
his book when he says that the Sermon on the
Mount " teaches, not by negative enactments
or by literal enactments at all, but by prin
ciples, positive and weighty principles." *
* Page 8.
TEACHING OF CHRIST 29
In the third place, Christ clearly taught
that the complete content of His revelation
would be gradually perceived as time went on.
His promise of the Spirit of Truth carried with
it an implicit warning against premature con
clusions as to the practical meaning of His
religion. There would be, He said, within the
society of believers a divine influence of
guidance and illumination, which would from
age to age interpret experience and apply the
principles of the everlasting Gospel to the
novel circumstances of human life. If we
would understand rightly the law of marriage
according to Christ we cannot limit ourselves
to a few texts from the Gospels, however
important these may be, but we must take into
our reckoning the whole movement of Christian
thought during the many centuries of the
existence of Christianity, and in the power of
the Holy Spirit, present still as always before
with Christian men, determine what shall be
the actual obligation of discipleship here and
now.
30 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
Bearing these important considerations in
mind we may proceed to collect the evidence
of the New Testament as to the doctrine of
our Lord on the subject of marriage. How
far, if at all, did He modify the current
practice? In the Sermon on the Mount our
Lord sets in contrast the laws of His spiritual
kingdom and the actual system of the Jews.
He was not legislating in the true sense of the
term, but rather laying down broad principles
of action. And this He did positively by
stating in its extremest form the action which
the right principle would require, if it were
logically applied without hindrance or mitiga
tion: and negatively, by showing what the
wrong principle implied even in its least
important applications. The whole passage
treating of the intercourse of the sexes runs as
follows :
" Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt not com
mit adultery: but I say unto you, that every one that
looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart. ... It was also
said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give
TEACHING OF CHRIST 31
her a writing of divorcement: but I say unto you, that
every one that putteth away his wife, saving for the
cause of fornication, maketh her an adulteress; and
whosoever shall marry her when she is put away com-
mitteth adultery." *
Later in the Gospel we have this declaration
repeated in an extremely interesting connec
tion. The narrative must be read as a whole :
" And there came unto him Pharisees, tempting him,
and saying, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife
for every cause? And he answered and said, Have ye
not read, that he which made them from the beginning
made them male and female, and said, For this cause
shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave
to his wife; and the twain shall become one flesh? so
that they are no more twain, but one flesh. What there
fore God hath joined together let not man put asunder.
They say unto him, Why then did Moses command to
give a bill of divorcement, and to put her away? He
saith unto them, Moses for your hardness of heart
suffered you to put away your wives: but from the
beginning it hath not been so. And I say unto you,
Whosoever shall put away his wife, except for fornica
tion, and shall marry another, committeth adultery:
and he that marrieth her when she is put away com
mitteth adultery. The disciples say unto him, If the
case of the man is so with his wife, it is not expedient
to marry. But he said unto them, All men cannot
receive this saying, but they to whom it is given. For
* St. Matthew v. 27, 28, 31, 32.
32 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
there are eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's
womb : and there are eunuchs, which were made eunuchs
by men : and there are eunuchs, which made themselves
eunuchs for the kingdom of Heaven's sake. He that
is able to receive it, let him receive it." *
In the Gospel according to St. Mark this
narrative is somewhat differently rendered.
Our Lord's condemnation of divorce is repre
sented as an answer to the questioning of His
disciples " in the house/' and the exception in
the case of adultery is omitted. The Evan
gelist appears to have added an explanatory
extension of our Lord's words for the benefit
of Roman readers, among whom it was
permitted for the wife to divorce the
husband, a franchise which the Jews did
not allow.
" He saith unto them, Whosoever shall put away his
wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against
her: and if she herself shall put away her husband, and
marry another, she committeth adultery." f
In St. Luke's Gospel we have the same ab
solute prohibition of divorce repeated, but in
* St. Matthew xix. 3-12. t St. Mark x. 1 1.
TEACHING OF CHRIST 33
a context which seems doubtful. The passage
runs thus :
" Every one that putteth away his wife, and marrieth
another, committeth adultery: and he that marrieth
one , that is put away from a husband committeth
adultery." *
In the fourth Gospel there is the touching
history of the woman taken in adultery, whom
Christ did not condemn, but this carries no
clear indication of His mind on the subject of
marriage. The point of the story is the
unseemliness of moral severity in those who
are themselves immoral.
Finally, in the Epistle to the Corinthians
St. Paul quotes a commandment of the Lord
to the following effect:
" But unto the married I give charge, yea not I, but
the Lord, that the wife depart not from her husband
(but and if she depart, let her remain unmarried, or else
be reconciled to her husband); and that the husband
leave not his wife." f
When we consider carefully these passages
it is hard to avoid the conclusion, that they all
relate to the same incident, and are repetitions
*St. Luke xvi. 18. f l Corinthians vii. 10, n.
D
34 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
more or less exact of one pronouncement.
Our Lord's words are to be interpreted in
connection with the challenge of the Pharisees
which called them forth. This challenge
certainly appears to be most correctly stated
in the Gospel according to St. Matthew.
" Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife
for every cause? " The judgment of Christ
was demanded on the question which at the
moment divided the religious world of Israel.
The rival schools of Hillel and Shammai
contended as to the interpretation of the
Deuteronomic law of divorce. The text of
that law was ambiguous.
" When a man taketh a wife, and marrieth her, then
it shall be, if she find no favour in his eyes, because he
hath found some unseemly thing in her, that he shall
write her a bill of divorcement, and give it into her
hand, and send her out of his house. And when she is
departed out of his house, she may go and be another
man's wife." *
The question in debate was the measure of
liberty of divorce granted in these words of
the Law. The school of Hillel explained them
* Deuteronomy xxiv. I, 2.
TEACHING OF CHRIST 35
to give an unlimited liberty to the husband.
He was himself judge of what should con
stitute an adequate justification for divorce.
He might, in the phrase of our Lord's
questioners, " put away his wife for every
cause." The opposing school of Shammai
took a stricter and worthier view. The words
could not possibly carry so scandalous a sense.
They must be supposed to restrict the causes
of lawful divorce to one — the act of adultery.
Our Lord decides on the question of interpre
tation in favour of the laxer school; on the
main question He emphatically endorses the
view of the stricter moralists, who had read
into the statute the nobler teaching of the
prophets. Challenged by the Pharisees how
He could reconcile these decisions, He declared
the essentially contingent, and therefore
transitory, character of the Mosaic legislation,
and pointed to the true nature of the marriage
union as declared in the record of Creation.
Marriage is indissoluble save for one fact which
destroys its presupposition. Divorce for any
36 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
other cause than adultery has no moral validity
however complete may be its legal sanction.
To put away a wife for a trivial cause was to
" make her an adulteress," that is, to degrade
her into that category and treat her accordingly .
This extreme injustice, however, could not
alter the fact. Wife she continued to be,
though the bill of divorcement were in her
hand, and whosoever married her, thus un
righteously divorced, was really as much
guilty of adultery as if he had taken her from
her husband's house.
Now I think, when Christ's words are thus
held strictly to their connection with the
historic situation in which they were uttered,
the absence of the saving clause in St. Mark's
version of His speech becomes comparatively
unimportant. There was no question any
where of a total prohibition of divorce. Both
the rival schools accepted the validity of the
Deuteronomic rule, and only differed about the
range of its application. In the actual ex
pressions ascribed to Christ by St. Mark there
TEACHING OF CHRIST 37
seems implied an allusion to the injustice
implied in such frivolous divorces as the Jews
admitted. " Whosoever shall put away his
wife, and marry another, committeth adultery
against her," that is, with respect to his
discarded partner, since she is really still his
wife.
I cannot doubt that He referred, and that
His words were understood to refer, to such
frivolous divorces as were common among the
Jews and directly in debate between the
Rabbinic schools. He proclaimed the in
dissoluble character of the marriage union,
that is, its indissolubleness as against the
provisions of human law, but He emphasised
the gravity of that sin which, by its own mere
force, cancelled and destroyed the natural
union. " Precisely as divorce does not break
the marriage tie, adultery does break it."
The very reason why divorce for any other
cause is invalid morally justifies, nay requires,
divorce in the case of adultery.
Accordingly I am constrained to conclude
38 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
that the words of Christ are unduly pressed
when it is said that " He gave no sanction to
any divorce which was supposed to carry with
it a right to marry again, before at least death
had severed the bond." He taught rather
that adultery destroyed the marriage bond.
The ancients knew no divorce which did not
carry the right to marry again, and Christ,
in disallowing the re-marriage of those who
were divorced for any cause save for the cause
of adultery, cannot reasonably be supposed to
prohibit the re-marriage of the divorced in
that special case.
The late Provost Salmon speaks with decision
on this point :
" It is contended that in this case [of the wife's adul
tery] a man may put away his wife, that is to say, may
separate her from bed and board, but still consider her
so much his wife as to be incapable of marriage with
another. But I do not know of any evidence that in
our Lord's time there had been invented this method of
acknowledging a woman to be a wife, but treating her
as if she were not. If divorce to this extent is permiss
ible, and if we are not to interpret the limitation in
Matthew as putting a distinction between adultery and
other causes for separation, the law of Deuteronomy
TEACHING OF CHRIST 39
practically remains in force. A man in whose eyes his
wife, for any cause, does not find favour, may deal with
her as the husband of an adulterous wife is permitted
to do; and, provided he does not marry again, need not
regard his vow to love his wife, comfort her, honour and
keep her." *
Commenting on the passages Mark x. 3-9
and Matt. xix. 4-8 he makes this just observa
tion:
"It is clear from the Old Testament quotation that
the breach of the marriage does not so much consist in
the marrying again as in the separation by man of those
whom God hath joined together: consequently the sin
is as much committed when man ordains a separation
from bed and board as when a new marriage is sanc
tioned." |
The basis on which Christ makes the excep
tion is nothing less than the destructive char
acter of the act of adultery. Divorce was but
the legal declaration of an accomplished fact;
the marriage bond had already been dissolved
by the act of infidelity, the sentence of a
human tribunal did but certify the fact.
It has been objected to this view that an
* See "The Human Element in the Gospels," p. 129.
•j- See Ibid., p. 392.
40 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
innocent person might cease to be married
without knowing it, and that if an adulterous
partner be forgiven there should properly be
a fresh marriage; but these objections are not
very serious. Marriage is a legal contract as
well as a natural union; the latter may be
destroyed while the former remains unaffected.
Only the law can undo the work of the law.
Divorce is a legal act dissolving marriage;
but marriage is far more than a legal act ; it is
a natural union, and the religious validity of
the legal act depends on its relation to the
natural union.
It is true that the natural union may be
dissolved without the knowledge of the innocent
partner; but that is precisely the reason why
the prophets and the Christian Church
emphasise the religious aspect of marriage.
The All-Seeing is a witness of all marriages, and
He watches over the fidelity of those whose
union He has ordained. Human law must
follow, so far as it can, the lines of moral fact.
The State ought not to uphold a covenant which
TEACHING OF CHRIST 41
has lost validity, where alone it could be valid,
in foro conscientice. It seems to follow that no
Christian can rightly condone adultery, for
that would be to acquiesce in a monstrous
association of the nature of polygamy.
In the case of adultery, discovered, repented
of and forgiven, it must be assumed that a new
marriage has really taken place, though of
course no fresh legal ceremony is requisite,
since the original contract has not been
cancelled by divorce. The essence of marriage
is free consent of the parties: that consent
is abrogated when an adulterous union is
formed: but the act of renouncing the sinful
connection on the one side, and of forgiving
the injury on the other, amounts on both
sides to a fresh act of consent, that is, to a
fresh marriage.
The reason why an adulterer should be
refused the permission legally to marry, which
is rightly allowed to the innocent party, lies,
presumably, not in the region of Christian
morality so much as in that of legal principle.
42 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
It is a sound rule of law that no man shall
profit by his own crime, and that rule appears
to be violated when the adulterer is enabled to
gain by his offence the very freedom which
he desires. The French law of divorce in
this respect appears sounder than our own.
" There is this limitation on the power of
re-marriage of divorced persons, that the party
to the marriage against whom the decree has
been pronounced is not allowed to marry the
person with whom his or her guilt has been
established. "
The direct teaching of Christ, then, as
preserved in the Gospels, does not carry us
beyond this point; and so far, save of course
for the supreme authority which He, and
He alone, could add to moral teaching, Christ
does not seem to carry the doctrine of
marriage beyond the point reached by the
prophet Malachi. The inference seems to be
equally clear and important.
Just as in the case of the other human
relationships the mind of Christ was to be
TEACHING OF CHRIST 43
slowly revealed to the conscience and reason
of the Church, as the Holy Spirit interpreted
experience in the light of the principles of the
Gospel, so it was to be in the case of this primary
and sacred relationship of the sexes. Indeed,
to the reflective student of the history of
Christendom it will necessarily occur that the
indirect consequences of Christ's Gospel have
been far more powerful influences for good on
human society than His precise directions.
Let anyone consider the effect on the doctrine
and practice of Christian marriage which has
come from four circumstances of the revelation
of God in Christ.
I. — The general character of the life of Christ
as plainly and confessedly normal. Ascetic
contempt of marriage very early stained
Christian thought and cast deep shadows
over Christian life, but that baleful temper
could find no support in the teaching or
example of the divine Lord. His contempor
aries were perplexed, and even scandalised
by the ordinary aspect of His life. It cannot
44 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
be a mere accident that the " beginning of
His signs " was made at a marriage in Cana of
Galilee. The Prayer Book justly infers the
dignity and pureness of marriage from the
fact that " Christ adorned and beautified with
His presence " that " holy estate."
Jews in the first century, like Christians in
later times, and perhaps like the " natural
man " at all times, expected an ascetic
ordering of life to mark a great religious
teacher; but Christ disappointed this ex
pectation. " The Son of Man came eating
and drinking " was His own description of
His life. In view of the fact that the sub-
Apostolic Church was invaded by a powerful
wave of ascetic sentiment, which has left clear
tokens of its action on the sacred writings, and
colours all the literature of the early centuries,
it must be allowed, to indicate the overmaster
ing impression made by the Lord's life and
teaching on His contemporaries, that the
Gospels preserve a record of both, which is
so wonderfully free from ascetic tendencies.
TEACHING OF CHRIST 45
Historically, asceticism is one of the two
grand enemies of the female sex; the other is
sensuality, and these two, if so familiar a
phrase may be allowed, play into one another's
hands. Asceticism belittles what sensuality
degrades. When, at a somewhat later stage
of Christian history, the theologians of the
Church elaborated the doctrine of the Incarna
tion, this consequence was seen to follow-
that all truly human relationships receive a
divine authentication and an eternal signifi
cance. Marriage as the human relationship par
excellence was more than any other exalted
by this fact.
II. — For, and this must be counted a distinct
cause, the historic Incarnation was effected by
the means of a natural birth. " When the ful
ness of the time came, God sent forth His Son,
born of a woman.' ' The Church was early called
to emphasise the moral importance of this fact,
and the presence in the Apostles' Creed of an
explicit declaration of belief in the birth of
Christ from a human mother must be regarded
46 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
as a definite repudiation of every version of
Christianity, which, as was the case with that
of the followers of Marcion in the second
century, against whom perhaps that clause in
the Creed was specifically directed, cuts the
direct connection between the Incarnate and
the human race by postulating for Him some
non-human mode of terrestrial existence.
Always the tradition of the Christian Church
holds together the mother and the divine Child;
and whosoever worships the one cannot but
reverence the other.
III. — It is in accordance with this exaltation
of woman in her most sublime function of
motherhood that the Gospel gives a large and
honourable place to women and children.
Significantly in the sacred narrative there
stand together Christ's declaration about the
essential indissolubleness of marriage and His
blessing of the children, for these are the
normal effect and the fairest grace of the
sexual relationship as guarded and crowned
in the Christian home. Christ's fondness for
TEACHING OF CHRIST 47
children was hardly less perplexing to His
religious contemporaries than His respectful
treatment of women. His disciples, we read,
" marvelled that He was speaking with a
woman " when they found Him in converse
with the woman of Samaria by the side
of Jacob's well; and they moved Him to
" indignation " by " rebuking " the Jewish
mothers who, with a true insight into His
mind, " brought unto Him little children that
He should touch them."
IV. — Christ's doctrine of purity as something
not to be narrowed down to specific acts, but
rather to be conceived of as a chaste and
reverent spirit inhabiting the mind, and hold
ing under control the very thoughts and intents
of the heart, necessarily tended, wherever it
was in any measure sincerely accepted, to purify
and exalt the relationship of the sexes. Far
more powerful than specific regulations was that
lofty declaration of the Sermon on the Mount :
" Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt not com
mit adultery: But I say unto you, that every one that
48 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart."
Is it not plain that marriage, contracted
under such a conception of purity, has a
security and a greatness, which are quite
absent from so mechanical a notion of its
obligation as that which breathes through the
Mosaic rules?
The teaching of Christ, then, is rather
implicit in the Gospel than specifically set
down in pronouncements. He adopts the
prophetic reading of the Jewish law, and
leaves His disciples to correlate that reading
with the knowledge of God which they received
from His example and His teachings. The
Christian doctrine of marriage must give free
expression to the " mind of Christ " as un
folded in the Gospel; and just in measure as
the Gospel is truly appreciated will that
doctrine be satisfying and permanent.
CHAPTER III
THE TEACHING OF ST. PAUL
IF it be important in studying the Gospels to
remember that they are neither codes of law
nor casuistic treatises, it is hardly less im
portant in reading the Epistles to remember
that they are always occasional documents
called forth by special circumstances, and only
rightly understood when those circumstances
are clearly kept in mind. In some sense we
may say of the Apostolic writings that they
were designed to serve the purposes of legal
codes and casuistic manuals in the churches
to which they were addressed; but, even so,
legislation and casuistry are, in the nature of
things, contingent and provisional. Neither,
therefore, can rightly be clothed with the
attributes of unalterableness and perpetual
obligation. It is mere matter of fact that
E 49
50 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
much of the Apostolic legislation on practical
matters has become obsolete, and accordingly
we cannot evade the question, whenever appeal
is made to Apostolic authority in discussions
of practical problems, whether the rulings
advanced are really relevant to the cases in
debate.
In all questions relating to the intercourse
of the sexes there is prima facie a large pro
bability that Apostolic rulings will be irrele
vant to modern difficulties, and this for two
reasons, which lie on the surface of the New
Testament. The apostles were Jews of the
first century, and they assumed the prevailing
Jewish notions with respect to the relative
position of the sexes: the natural inequality
of men and women coloured their thought,
even when they had risen to the Christian
doctrine, that such natural inequality had
properly disappeared in the Church. This
was one reason; the strength of which will
be at once apparent to every reader of the
curious passage in which St. Paul legislates for
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 51
the conduct of women in the assemblies for
worship.
The other reason lies in the special circum
stances of the Apostolic converts. Pagan
presuppositions in their minds, pagan tradition
governing their action, determined necessarily
the specific form of the admonitions by which
the apostles endeavoured to correct both, and
to bring their spiritual children into worthy
habits of thought and life. Of St. Paul it has
been said with substantial truth that he " did
not in any way go beyond the conception of
woman's position which at bottom belonged
to the whole ancient world," and of the first
Epistle to the Corinthians, which is our chief
authority for learning what the apostle's
teaching with respect to marriage actually
was, it has been justly observed that " in its
main portions it is chiefly a history of the
difficulties which the Gospel had to contend
with on heathen soil."*
It is indeed the case that within the life of
* See Weizsacker, "Apostolic Age," vol. i. p. 339, vol. ii. p. 384.
52 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
Israel the general doctrine of the natural
inferiority of women had been mitigated, and
in great part corrected, by the teaching, moral
and theological, of the prophets, and we have
seen that our Saviour emphatically endorsed
the prophetic view of marriage ; still, it cannot
be denied that St. Paul reveals in many places
a mental attitude on the subject of sexual
relationship, which can only be explained by
the Rabbinic training which he had received
at the feet of Gamaliel.
There is, however, clear indication that his
views on this, as on other subjects, were
developing under the influence of the Holy
Spirit, interpreting to him his richly- varied
experiences, and leading him to realise more
thoroughly, as time passed, the practical
consequences of his Christian principles. The
noble passage in the Epistle to the Ephesians
carries the theory of marriage far beyond the
point at which it stands in the Epistle to the
Corinthians, and we shall be justified, by all
we know of the great apostle's mental history,
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 53
in attaching far greater importance to those
declarations which are definitely, from the
point of view of his time, novel than to those
which do but echo the current notions of the
schools.
If we are disposed to hesitate as to the
legitimacy of thus distinguishing between
apostolic pronouncements, and attaching
superior importance to those which succeed in
commending themselves to our own percep
tions of spiritual fitness, we may remember
that St. Paul himself bids us thus distinguish,
and, specifically with reference to his discussion
of sexual questions, makes his appeal to the
Christian conscience.
" Now concerning virgins I have no commandment
of the Lord: but I give my judgment, as one that hath
obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful. I think
therefore that this is good by reason of the present
distress, namely, that it is good for a man to be as he is." *
In these words there is disclosed another
determining factor of Apostolic morality.
" The present distress " is an allusion to the
* i Corinthians vii. 25, 26.
54 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
end of the age, which was generally believed by
Christians in that time to be impending, and
was supposed to bring with it a period of
great calamity. This expectation tended to
strengthen the wave of asceticism, which had
already begun to make its appearance among
Christians, and has left very distinct im
pressions on the Apostolic writings. If
celibacy is exalted, and marriage discouraged,
we must bear in mind the obvious practical
considerations which justified both counsels,
on the supposition that the whole system of
human life was on the brink of the final
catastrophe.
Before we can accept the rulings of the
Apostolic age as obligatory on our own, we
must be sure that they do not reflect the
distinctive and long- discarded beliefs of that
age as to the end of the world. It will be
apparent that a mere quoting of texts will not
serve the turn of any serious inquirer into the
permanent teaching of St. Paul; there is a
process of careful examination to be carried
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 55
through before the exact value of any specific
declaration is fixed. As with the Lord Him
self, so with His apostles ; nothing is in such
wise delivered to the Church as to settle the
problems of practical life in advance of their
actual emergence in Christian experience.
Bearing these considerations in mind we may
conveniently gather the teaching of St. Paul
under five heads:
I . — His general attitude towards sexual sin.
II. — His consistent opposition to asceticism.
III. — His doctrine with respect to the
female sex.
IV. — His ruling as to divorce.
V. — His ruling as to mixed marriages.
I. — Every reader of the Pauline Epistles
knows that the apostle everywhere manifests
a horror and dread of sexual sin. As a devout
and spiritually-minded Pharisee he had been
taught to regard with deep aversion the moral
licentiousness of the Gentile world; and this
hereditary zeal for purity had been stimulated
56 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
and exalted by his discipleship. His con
ception of the Gospel as the revelation of the
righteousness of God in judgment on sin, and
in victory over sin, led him to emphasise the
gravity of the prevailing licentiousness. A
sufficient indication of his mind is found in
the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans,
where he draws a fearful picture of Gentile
society as sunken in sexual vices, and with pro
phetic fervour proclaims the severe retribution
of God's vengeance which would surely follow.
As he founded churches in the cities of the
Empire he added the character of a pastor to
that of an evangelist, and his pastoral activity
stands on record in the Epistles. It is clear
that at every point he was compelled to do
battle with the tradition of sexual licence
which prevailed among his converts. In the
earliest of his extant epistles he lays down the
grand principle that discipleship implied
purity. " For God called us not for unclean-
ness, but in sanctification." *
* i Thessalonians iv. 7.
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 57
To the Corinthians he insists upon the fatal
character of the sins of the flesh as excluding
men from entrance into the kingdom of God,
as. desecrating the " temple of the Holy
Ghost/' as bringing judgments on the Church,
and as being so infectious that nothing but
prompt expulsion of the guilty could preserve
the moral soundness of the Church. He even
applies to irregular sexual unions the words
which were designed to describe the union in
marriage, and suggests that such impure
connections inflict injury on the enduring self,
which survives the decay of the physical
nature. The emotion with which he writes
indicates the strength of his conviction that
the very life of Christianity was imperilled
by the moral laxity of the Corinthians :
"The body is not for fornication, but for the Lord;
and the Lord for the body: and God both raised the
Lord, and will raise up us through his power. Know
ye not that your bodies are members of Christ? shall I
then take away the members of Christ, and make them
members of an harlot? God forbid. Or know ye not
that he that is joined to an harlot is one body? for,
The twain, saith he, shall become one flesh. But he
58 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornica
tion. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body ;
but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his
own body. Or know ye not that your body is a temple
of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have from
God? and ye are not your own; for ye were bought
with a price : glorify God therefore in your body." *
It needs not to accumulate quotations, for
the salient fact is not in dispute. The
insistence of St. Paul on chastity of thought
and act as indispensable in the Christian must
necessarily determine our general estimate of
his teaching about marriage, the relationship
which is more than any other affected by the
standard of purity which is recognised by the
general conscience. Any society which re
garded the apostle's writings as inspired
Scripture, and made them the authoritative
source of moral teaching, could not but rise out
of the depravity of ancient paganism and reach
a level of domestic purity higher than any
imaginable by the men of the time.
II. — To the same effect was St. Paul's
consistent opposition to asceticism. It is
* i Corinthians vi. 13-20.
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 59
indeed not to be denied that the apostle, when
he discusses the questions of the Corinthians
on marriage and divorce, starts from the
assumption that celibacy is to be ranked higher
than married life ; but he separates his teaching
decisively from that of his ascetic contempor
aries by giving reasons of a purely practical
character for this exaltation of the single life,
and by insisting on the lawfulness and the
purity of marriage. He seems to regard
celibacy and marriage as two specific states of
the Christian life, equally requiring a vocation,
equally pure, but under all the circumstances
of the time, with persecution always threaten
ing, the Lord's work always demanding a
complete concentration of thought and energy
from those who were charged with it, and the
Lord's return in judgment and victory always
at hand, not equally expedient and befitting.
He quotes a passage from the Apocryphal
Second Book of Esdras, and applies it to the
existing situation:
" But this I say, brethren, the time is shortened, that
60 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
henceforth both those that have wives may be as though
they had none; and those that weep, as though they
wept not; and those that rejoice, as though they re
joiced not; and those that buy, as though they possessed
not; and those that use the world as not abusing it:
for the fashion of this world passeth away. But I would
have you to be free from cares. He that is unmarried
is careful for the things of the Lord, how he may please
the Lord : but he that is married is careful for the things
of the world, how he may please his wife. And there
is a difference also between the wife and the virgin. She
that is unmarried is careful for the things of the Lord,
that she may be holy both in body and spirit; but she
that is married is careful for the things of the world,
how she may please her husband. And this I say for
your own profit; not that I may cast a snare upon you,
but for that which is seemly, and that ye may attend
upon the Lord without distraction." *
We must remember that St. Paul could
hardly have realised the possibility of a wife
being competent to strengthen and not en
feeble her husband in difficulty and affliction.
Himself unmarried, he formed his notion of
married life from observation solely, and the
testimony thus rendered would not encourage
a very exalted opinion of the wife as the
comrade and friend of her husband.
* i Corinthians vii. 29-35.
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 61
" The Greek girl, brought up in ignorance and seclu
sion, was not fitted to be the comrade of her husband,
nor could her husband, in most cases, either truly love
her or know anything of her character before marriage.
The great Greek plays leave love as a motive for mar
riage just as much out of sight as St. Paul does. So,
also, we must remember that a Corinthian Christian would
scarcely ever have any real security that the same course
of action would please the Lord and please his wife.
St. Paul spoke of things as he found them." *
When we add that the arguments based on
the probability of persecution, and on the
certainty of the speedy coming of Christ, have
been disallowed by experience, it would seem
that little or nothing can be concluded for the
guidance of the modern Church from the
apostle's evident preference for the single life.
Moreover, his language in the later Epistle to
the Ephesians places marriage on so exalted a
plane that it is not possible to imagine any
higher, and we may conclude, if we will, that
experience tended to correct whatever there
was of error in the earlier opinions.
Asceticism was one aspect of a form of
thought which was widely spread in the world
* See Goudge, " I Corinthians," p. 64.
62 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
at the time when Christianity came into exist
ence, and within Christianity speedily came to
exercise a potent and most unhappy influence.
In spite of the fact that asceticism ran directly
counter to the whole genius and habit of
Judaism, it appears certain that among the
Jews there were those who indulged in the
speculations out of which ascetic practices
were developed. In the Epistle to the Colos-
sians the apostle is evidently concerned with
controverting teachings which stood in con
nection with ascetic doctrines of conduct.
Bishop Lightfoot traces the origin of these
doctrines to a Jewish source, and regards the
Essenes as the original representatives of the
asceticism which has worked such havoc in
the Church. He gives the following account
of the Essene attitude towards marriage:
" To the legalism of the Pharisee, the Essene added an
asceticism, which was peculiarly his own, and which in
many respects contradicted the tenets of the other sect.
The honourable, and even exaggerated, estimate of mar
riage, which was characteristic of the Jew, and of the
Pharisee as the typical Jew, found no favour with the
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 63
Essene. Marriage was to him an abomination. Those
Essenes who lived together as members of an order,
and in whom the principles of the sect were carried to
their logical consequences, eschewed it altogether. To
secure the continuance of their brotherhood they adopted
children, whom they brought up in the doctrines and
practices of the community. There were others how
ever who took a different view. They accepted mar
riage, as necessary for the preservation of the race. Yet
even with them it seems to have been regarded only as
an inevitable evil. They fenced it off by stringent
rules, demanding a three years' probation and enjoining
various purificatory rites. The conception of marriage,
as quickening and educating the affections and thus
exalting and refining human life, was wholly foreign to
their minds. Woman was a mere instrument of tempta
tion in their eyes, deceitful, faithless, selfish, jealous,
misled and misleading by her passions." *
The theological speculations of the Essenes
appear to have conformed to the general type
which, at a somewhat later period, became
known as Gnostic, and their opinions tended
to find practical expression in ascetic severity.
"If," concludes the Bishop, " the notices relating to
these points do not always explain themselves, yet read
in the light of the heresies of the Apostolic age, and in
that of subsequent Judseo-Christianity, their bearing
seems to be distinct enough; so that we should not be
* " Colossians," pp. 85, 86.
64 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
far wrong, if we were to designate Essenism as Gnostic
Judaism." *
At Colossae the Gnostic tendency revealed
itself in the insistence on minute prohibitions,
limiting the liberty of the Christian at every
turn in his use of things in themselves lawful,
and the object of these disciplinary rules was
" to check the indulgence of the flesh," but
this object was not attained.
"If ye died with Christ from the rudiments of the
world, why, as though living in the world, do ye subject
yourselves to ordinances, Handle not, nor taste, nor
touch (all which things are to perish with the using)
after the precepts and doctrines of men? Which things
have indeed a show of wisdom in will-worship, and
humility, and severity to the body; but are not of any
value against the indulgence of the flesh." f
In the pastoral Epistles " forbidding to
marry " is expressly included among the
" seducing spirits and doctrines of devils "
which will mark the apostates " in later
times," and when we reflect on the long
train of degrading consequences which have
flowed Irom Christian asceticism, and notably
* See " Colossians," p. 93. f Colossians ii. 20-23.
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 65
from that exaltation of celibacy, as intrinsic
ally purer than marriage, which still
disturbs the practice, and confuses the
thought, of Christendom, it is impossible to
question the truth of the melancholy fore
cast.
It is difficult to over-estimate the importance
of the fact that, at the start of its history, the
Catholic Church was committed to the
championship of marriage. The full signifi
cance of that championship is only realised
when it is set in connection with the passion
for purity which, as we have shown, marked
the teaching of the apostles. In both respects
the healthy tradition of the prophets, con
firmed by the supreme and deliberate sanction
of the Lord, came into conflict with powerful
tendencies of the age, and rescued the new
religion from the most perilous and the most
plausible of perversions.
III. — St. Paul's teaching with respect to
women was clearly determined by influences
of widely differing kinds. First of all,
66 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
unquestionably, we must place the training he
had received in the Rabbinic schools of
Jerusalem. Next, we must take account of
the modification, to which that training
necessarily was subjected, from the mere
circumstance that he had become a Christian,
and as such had to correlate his old beliefs
with his new discipleship. Then we have to
give a great place to his personal experience
of Christian women, such as were, if with St.
Chrysostom we so read the name, Junia, who
was accounted " of note among the apostles,"
and Phoebe, the trusted deaconess of Cenchreae,
and the ladies, Euodia and Syntyche, who
were evidently the leading members of the
Philippian Church, and Priscilla, who had been
the teacher in the faith of his eloquent friend,
Apollos.
Finally, we have to allow for his pastoral
experience, which brought home to him the
special risks which attached to feminine action
in the churches, and the necessity of taking
effectual measures to protect modesty against
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 67
enthusiasm. These different influences com
bined in the apostle's teaching, but they
operated with varying degrees of power at
different times in his career; and, accordingly,
it is easy to fail in doing justice to his real
views.
Perhaps the most characteristic and, for
our present purpose, the most luminous
utterance is that which deals with the practical
question of female conduct in the public
assemblies. The Rabbinist, the Christian,
the pastor, the statesman are all represented
in this curious passage:
" Now I praise you that ye remember me in all things,
and hold fast the traditions, even as I delivered them
to you. But I would have you know, that the head of
every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the
man; and the head of Christ is God. Everyman
praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dis-
honoureth his head. But every woman praying or
prophesying with her head unveiled dishonoureth her
head: for it is one and the same thing as if she were
shaven. For if a woman is not veiled, let her also be
shorn: but if it is a shame to a woman to be shorn or
shaven, let her be veiled. For a man indeed ought not
to have his head veiled, forasmuch as he is the image and
glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.
68 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of
the man : for neither was the man created for the woman ;
but the woman for the man: for this cause ought the
woman to have a sign of authority on her head, because
of the angels. Howbeit neither is the woman without
the man, nor the man without the woman, in the Lord.
For as the woman is of the man, so is the man also by
the woman; but all things are of God. Judge ye in
yourselves: is it seemly that a woman pray unto God
unveiled? Doth not even nature itself teach you, that,
if a man have long hair it is a dishonour to him? But
if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her
hair is given her for a covering. But if any man seemeth
to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the
churches of God." *
It is characteristic of St. Paul to base even
the seemingly most trivial of his practical
counsels on the largest principles, so here,
when he finds it necessary to regulate the
procedure of Christian women in the congrega
tion, he brings in the first principles of
religion.
The natural order in which woman is subject
to man is connected with the Christian doctrine
of the Incarnation, that he may hold together
the fundamental equality of spiritual status,
* i Corinthians xi. 2-16.
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 69
which the Gospel declared, and the subordina
tion of the female sex, which the circumstances
of the time rendered imperative, in the most
evident interest of the Christian character.
He appeals to the historic fact, as he supposed,
that woman was created out of man, and to
the divine purpose so disclosed, viz., that
woman should be a help meet for man. He
declares the natural and the religious inter
dependence of the sexes. He appeals to the
general sense of decency, and insists on
recognising it as the expression of a divine
law. All the while he keeps steadily in view
the actual situation of the Church in Corinth.
The Jews were wont to pray covered, as
well men as women; the Greeks prayed with
bare heads* Corinth was a notorious centre
of sexual vice, and of all places there was none
in which any relaxation of traditional discipline
could be permitted with greater risk to female
chastity. The apostle makes a new rule to
meet the situation. Men shall follow the
Greek practice, women the Jewish; and the
70 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
rule shall stand on a basis of fundamental
doctrine. Subordination of rank and variety
of function shall be shown to be consistent
with, nay inseparable from, the Christian
doctrine of spiritual equality.
St. Paul connects the subordination of wife
to husband in the union of marriage with the
subordination of Christ to God in the mystery
of the Incarnation. The connection carried
the assurance that whatever Rabbinic pre
judices clouded his understanding as to the
full practical significance of the equality in
Christ, which the Gospel taught, were passing
away.
Just as the prophetic association of mono
gamy with monotheism compelled a lofty
doctrine of marriage, so the association of
Christian marriage with the mystic union
betwixt Christ and the Church inspired
a sublime version of the relationship of
husband and wife. Obedience implied
protection; power was linked with sacri
fice. Subordination was exalted by love.
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 71
Authority was conditioned and interpreted
by service.
" Wives, be in subjection unto your own husbands,
as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the
wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, being
himself the saviour of the body. But as the church is
subject to Christ, so let the wives also be to their hus
bands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even
as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up
for it; that he might sanctify it, having cleansed it
by the washing of water with the word, that he might
present the church to himself a glorious church, not
having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that it
should be holy and without blemish. Even so ought
husbands also to love their own wives as their own bodies.
He that loveth his own wife loveth himself: for no man
ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth
it, even as Christ also the church; because we are
members of his body. For this cause shall a man leave
his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and
the twain shall become one flesh. This mystery is great :
but I speak in regard of Christ and of the church. Never
theless do ye also severally love each one his own wife
even as himself; and let the wife see that she fear her
husband." *
No current of ascetic sentiment would ever
be able to sweep the Christian Church from
the sublime doctrine of marriage thus included
in the canon of Scripture. Every other
* Ephesians v. 22-33.
72 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
passage in the Pauline writings must be
harmonised with this crowning exposition.
IV. — The seventh chapter of the first Epistle
to the Corinthians contains the apostle's
rulings on certain practical matters of difficulty
which had been referred to his decision. Of
these the most urgent and permanently im
portant was the question of divorce. There
are two distinct cases. First, when both
husband and wife are Christians: next, when
one or other of the parties is an unbeliever.
In the former case St. Paul adduces the com
mandment of Christ prohibiting divorce. In
the latter case he makes the validity of the
marriage turn on the willingness of the heathen
partner to maintain it.
In the event of desertion in consequence of
Christianity, he allows divorce and, since no
other kind of divorce was known to the ancient,
re-marriage. We must suppose the apostle to
have in mind the facile and frequent divorces
of Greek and Roman life, and the extreme
repugnance which in some cases the fact of
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 73
Christianity provoked. His ruling is thus
expressed:
" But unto the married I give charge, yea not I, but
the Lord, that the wife depart not from her husband
(but and if she depart, let her remain unmarried, or else
be reconciled to her husband); and that the husband
leave not his wife. But to the rest say I, not the Lord:
If any brother hath an unbelieving wife, and she is con
tent to dwell with him, let him not leave her. And
the woman which hath an unbelieving husband, and
he is content to dwell with her, let her not leave
her husband. For the unbelieving husband is sancti
fied in the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified
in the brother; else were your children unclean; but
now are they holy. Yet if the unbelieving departeth,
let him depart: the brother or the sister is not under
bondage in such cases : but God hath called us in peace.
For how knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save
thy husband? or how knowest thou, 0 husband, whether
thou shalt save thy wife? Only, as the Lord hath
distributed to each man, as God hath called each, so let
him walk. And so ordain I in all the churches." *
It is important to appreciate the broad
principles on which the apostle rests his
decision. The essence of the natural union is
the free mutual consent of the parties; if
that condition be not abolished by the con
version of one of them to Christianity, then he
* i Corinthians vii. 10-17.
74 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
insists on the validity of the marriage; but
so great an event is conversion, nothing less
than the new birth of the individual, that a fresh
act of consent on the part of the unconverted
partner is necessary if the marriage is to be
sustained. This act is implied in willingness
to dwell with the Christian.
St. Paul does not allow the Corinthian
suggestion that the contact with an unbeliever
in marriage was itself polluting; rather he
advances the profound doctrine that the
Christian partner carried a consecration to the
husband or the wife, and brought them, not
less than the children of a Christian parent,
within the sphere of holiness. Nor will he allow
the Christian to break up the marriage which
the unbeliever is willing to maintain, because
to do this would be to run counter to the
cardinal truth that natural relationships are
confirmed, hallowed and immortalised in
Christ. In the case, however, of a refusal to
dwell with the Christian, St. Paul regards the
marriage as null and void, and grants liberty
TEACHING OF ST. PAUL 75
of re-marriage to the Christian, on the principle
that no natural franchise is forfeited by
discipleship.
V. — The same principles governed the
apostle's ruling on the subject of fresh mixed
marriages. He forbids the widow to re-marry
except " in the Lord," which can hardly mean
less than a prohibition of marriage with a non-
Christian. In the second epistle we have the
prohibition stated at length, and with much
solemnity :
" Be not unequally yoked with unbelievers: for what
fellowship have righteousness and iniquity? or what
communion hath light with darkness? and what concord
hath Christ with Belial? or what portion hath a believer
with an unbeliever? And what agreement hath a
temple of God with idols? for we are a temple of the
living God." *
This language is general, and both in ancient
and in modern times it has been questioned
whether it is intended to refer to mixed
marriages: St. Augustine says he does not
remember a passage in the New Testament
forbidding in unambiguous terms Christians
* 2 Corinthians vi. 14-16.
76 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
to marry unbelievers. It is certain that mixed
marriages have been frequent in all ages since
the first ; nevertheless, I must needs hold that
the apostle's solemn warnings have their first
and most evident relevance to the case of the
most intimate of all unions, and that mixed
marriages must be justified on other grounds
than those of the ambiguity of Scripture.
CHAPTER IV
MARRIAGE WITHIN THE CHURCH BEFORE
THE REFORMATION
" CHRISTIANITY has had no greater practical
effect on the life of mankind than in its belief
that marriage is no mere civil contract, but a
vow in the sight of God binding both parties
by obligations of conscience above and beyond
those of civil law." These words of the late
Sir Francis Jeune express the conclusion which
many students of the history of Christendom
have reached.
Gibbon, for instance, rises above his general
attitude of scarcely veiled disdain when
Christianity is in question, and allows the
excellent effect which Christian doctrine and
practice had on the domestic life of Europe.
After describing the degradation of marriage
among the Romans of the later Republic and
77
78 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
the Empire, he says that " the dignity of
marriage was restored by the Christians/'
and shows that " the Christian princes were
the first who specified the just causes of a
private divorce." Burke found the worst and
guiltiest feature in the French Revolution in
its repudiation of the Christian conception of
marriage. His fierce language was, perhaps,
in this respect hardly excessive:
" Other legislators, knowing that marriage is the origin
of all relations, and consequently the first element of all
duties, have endeavoured by every art to make it sacred.
The Christian religion, by confining it to the pairs, and
by rendering that relation indissoluble, has by these
two things done more towards the peace, happiness,
settlement, and civilisation of the world than by any
other part in this whole scheme of Divine wisdom. The
direct contrary course has been taken in the synagogue
of Antichrist, — I mean in that forge and manufactory of
all evil, the sect which predominated in the Constituent
Assembly of 1789. Those monsters employed the same
or greater industry to desecrate and degrade that state
which other legislators have used to render it holy
and honourable. By a strange uncalled-for declara
tion they pronounced that marriage was no better than
a common civil contract. . . .
" The practice of divorce, though in some countries
permitted, has been discouraged in all. In the East,
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 79
polygamy and divorce are in discredit ; and the manners
correct the laws. In Rome, whilst Rome was in its
integrity, the few causes allowed for divorce amounted
in effect to a prohibition. They were only three. The
arbitrary was totally excluded; and accordingly some
hundreds of years passed without a single example of
that kind. When manners were corrupted the laws
were relaxed; as the latter always follow the former
when they are not able to regulate them or to vanquish
them. Of this circumstance the legislators of vice and
crime were pleased to take notice, as an inducement to
adopt their regulation: holding out a hope that the
permission would rarely be made use of. They knew
the contrary to be true; and they had taken good care
that the laws should be well seconded by the manners.
Their law of divorce, like all their laws, had not for its
object the relief of domestic uneasiness, but the total
corruption of all morals, the total disconnection of social
life." *
The student of Christian history must be
prepared for grave disappointment when he
turns from such glowing eulogies of Christi
anity to seek their justifications in fact. It
was only by very slow degrees, and with long
intervals of desolating error, that the Christian
Church arrived at such a theory and practice
with respect to marriage as permits the
* See " Letters on a Regicide Peace," Works, vol. v. p. 3i2f.
8o CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
language I have quoted from lawyer, historian
and statesman. We have seen already that
there is need to guard against the attractive
mistake of supposing that the New Testament
contains a clear and final determination of
the practical problems connected with
marriage.
Reading back into the text of the Gospels
and the Epistles the conclusions which
Christians have reached at the close of nearly
two millenniums of experience, and which
must assuredly be held to represent the
guidance of the Spirit of God, we are able to
find in the New Testament the authoritative
statements of the Christian law; but when
we examine the sacred text as historical
students, and trace the effect which those
statements have had on the life of Christians,
we are perforce led to the conclusion that they
were not, and were not understood to be,
what we have been accustomed to think.
The Christian religion, indeed, included a
conception of human nature, and of human
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 81
destiny, which could not but have a cleansing
and uplifting effect on society, wherever society
admitted its control; and the tradition of the
Founder carried into human life, wherever
the Christian Church came, an ideal of indi
vidual character, and a sublime example of
individual conduct, which wonderfully moved
and exalted sincere professors of Christianity.
These elements of historic Christianity were
present and active from the first, and their
influence is traceable rather in the creation of
a new and higher state of feeling on the subject
of sexual relationships, than in the formal
legislation of Church or State.
Mr. Lecky has justly observed that " the
facts in moral history, which it is at once
most important and most difficult to appreci
ate, are what may be called the facts of feel
ing. It is," he says, " much easier to show
what men did or taught than to realise the
state of mind that rendered possible such
actions or teachings; and in the case before
us " — he writes with reference to the position
REGK"
BIBL. MAI.
82 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
of women among the ancients — " we have to
deal with a condition of feeling so extremely
remote from that of our own day that the
difficulty is pre-eminently great."*
The gradual revolution in feeling with
respect to sexual relationships is the salient
fact of the history, when the eifect of Christi
anity on marriage is discussed. This revolu
tion was effected under the influence of four
powerful factors, which in succession domin
ated Christian thought and practice. These
were external to Christianity, but they
served the purpose of helping the Church to
fashion what we understand by " Christian
Marriage."
In their historic order these factors are the
following: I. Asceticism; II. The Imperial
Codes; III. The German Spirit; IV. The Canon
Law. The first stamped on the human con
science an exalted regard for the virtue of
chastity. The next emphasised the social
* See " History of European Morals," vol. ii. p. 281, Eleventh
Edition.
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 83
and legal aspects of marriage. The third
created the sentiment of chivalry. The last
created the ecclesiastical conception of
marriage as a " sacrament." These notions
constitute the elements out of which the
conception of Christian marriage, as it exists
to-day, have been fashioned. Chastity, law,
chivalry, the sacramental idea — every one of
these is capable of dangerous exaggeration,
and in point of fact has been dangerously
exaggerated, but none of them can be let slip
out of the complete doctrine of marriage.
It will be our task to distinguish and appraise
these four historical conditions of Christian
development.
I. — Asceticism, as we have seen, had already
made its presence felt when the New Testa
ment was in process of formation. The
apostles themselves were not unaffected by it,
although it is true to say that in the main they
threw their influence steadily against it; but,
with the expansion of Christianity in the
corrupt society of the Empire, a strong current
84 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
of ascetic sentiment entered the Church and
carried all before it.
The philosophic historian may indulge the
reflection that the ascetic exaltation of vir
ginity, and corresponding depreciation of all
sexual relationships, were necessary phases of
the difficult movement out of mere animalism
into a worthier conception of the marriage
covenant. He will point out the grossness
of the current paganism, its inability to con
ceive of the moral and spiritual aspects of the
sexual union, its frightful debasement of the
female sex by the practice of concubinage and
the facility of divorce. He will emphasise the
extraordinary difficulties under which the
infant Christian Church laboured in a society
penetrated with the habits of sensuality, and
built up on the debasing foundation of slavery.
He will descend to details, and ask how a
steady insistence on monogamy and marital
faithfulness could have been possible in the
case of communities largely composed of
slaves, among whom the males were many
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 85
times more numerous than the females. In
view of the entire situation he may conclude
that the vehement exaltation of virginity
by the Christian Church was an indispensable
means of establishing in the minds of men the
notion of chastity.
These are reasonable and clearly relevant
reflections when the question under considera
tion is the genesis of the doctrine of Christian
marriage, but they are not available for those
exponents of Christianity who attribute bind
ing force to the precedents and enactments of
the undivided Church. Only by distinguishing
clearly between the Christian religion and the
society, through which it has found expression
in human life, can we admit the excuses of
history for the errors of the Church. It will
be worth while to quote the carefully balanced
language of Mr. Lecky on this subject:
" But the services rendered by the ascetics in im
printing on the minds of men a profound and enduring
conviction of the importance of chastity, though ex
tremely great, were seriously counterbalanced by their
noxious influence upon marriage. Two or three beauti-
86 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
ful descriptions of this institution have been culled out
of the immense mass of the patristic writings; but, in
general, it would be difficult to conceive anything more
coarse or more repulsive than the manner in which they
regarded it. The relation which nature has designed
for the noble purpose of repairing the ravages of death,
and which, as Linnaeus has shown, extends even through
the world of flowers, was invariably treated as a conse
quence of the fall of Adam, and marriage was regarded
almost exclusively in its lowest aspect. The tender
love which it elicits, the holy and beautiful domestic
qualities that follow in its train, were almost absolutely
omitted from consideration. The object of the ascetic
was to attract men to a life of virginity, and, as a neces
sary consequence, marriage was treated as an inferior
state. It was regarded as being necessary, indeed, and
therefore justifiable, for the propagation of the species,
and to free men from greater evils; but still as a con
dition of degradation from which all who aspired to real
sanctity should fly. To ' cut down by the axe of Vir
ginity the wood of Marriage,' was, in the energetic
language of St. Jerome, the end of the saint; and if he
consented to praise marriage it was merely because it
produced virgins. Even when the bond had been formed,
the ascetic passion retained its sting. We have already
seen how it embittered other relations of domestic life.
Into this, the holiest of all, it infused a tenfold bitter
ness. Whenever any strong religious fervour fell upon
a husband or a wife, its first effect was to make a happy
union impossible. The more religious partner im
mediately desired to live a life of solitary asceticism,
or at least, if no ostensible separation took place, an un
natural life of separation in marriage. The immense
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 87
place this order of ideas occupies in the hortatory writings
of the Fathers, and in the legends of the saints, must be
familiar to all who have any knowledge of this depart
ment of literature." *
Perhaps the most permanently mischievous
consequence of primitive asceticism was that
which has established over the greater part of
Christendom the rule of clerical celibacy.
" That one great branch of the Church should have
so ordered the domestic life of the clergy for a thousand
years that a priest should be in virtue of his office a
suspected person and his house a suspected house, about
which nearly every Church assembly that meets must
pass a warning canon, is a standing blot upon Christianity
which concerns us all."
That opinion of the present Bishop of Salisbury
will commend itself as just to every student
of mediaeval history. In connection with this
subject the reader may be referred to the
learned discussion in chapter iv. of the
Bishop's "Ministry of Grace." The chapter
is entitled, " Christian Asceticism and the
Celibacy of the Clergy," and is filled with
curious learning and weighty judgments.
* See " History of European Morals," vol. ii. p. 32of, Eleventh
Edition.
88 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
II. — When the Empire became professedly
Christian a powerful new influence was
brought to bear on the development of Christian
morality. The Church, in modern phrase, now
became established by the State, and at once
displayed the conservative temper which
marks all established institutions. The law
and system of the Empire received a measure
of consecration when Const antine added the
cross to the Roman standards and reigned as a
Christian sovereign.
There was both gain and loss in the change.
It bred a new spirit of demoralising complais
ance in Christian minds, and opened an epoch
of clerical corruption, but it also brought the
influence of the Gospel to bear over a far larger
area of human life, and affected for good the
laws and their administration. The institu
tions of the Christian emperors, says Gibbon,
" appear to fluctuate between the custom of
the Empire and the wishes of the Church/'
Yet in fundamental principles the Empire and
the Church were antagonistic. " Christi-
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 89
anity," wrote Bishop Westcott in his remark
able essay on " The Two Empires: the Church
and the World/' " was destined by its very
nature not to save but to destroy the Empire/'
and perhaps the truth of this observation is
nowhere more clearly seen than in the handling
of marriage. The influence of the Empire long
restrained the full operation of Christian ideas,
and before those ideas could find free ex
pression the Empire had to be destroyed.
We may select for sufficient example the
case of the marriage of slaves. Two questions
were to be answered in connection with this
subject. In the first place, might slaves marry
at all? In the next place, might they marry
any save slaves? The Roman law did not
regard the slave as a person, but as a chattel;
accordingly marriage was not in his case
permissible. Human nature, however, is
stronger than legal theory, and, in point of
fact, unions, which may fairly be regarded as
marriages, were contracted by slaves with the
consent of their masters. Christianity accepted
90 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
slavery as part of the natural order of human
life, and adopted into its own discipline the
rule that, apart from the master's consent,
there could be no marriage of slaves. In the
view of the ancients slaves and children stood
in the same position so far as personal liberty
went. Bingham says:
" And therefore it was equally a crime for a slave to
marry without consent of the master as for a child to
do it without consent of parents. And for the same
reason a slave was not allowed either to enter himself
into a monastery, or take orders, without the consent
of his master . . . because this was to deprive his
master of his legal right of service, which, by the original
state and condition of slaves, was his due: and the
Church would not be accessory to such frauds and in
justice, but rather discouraged them by prohibitions and
suitable penalties laid upon them." *
It is sufficiently evident that this could not be
a final, and was never a satisfactory, solution of
the problem ; with the Gospel in its hands, and
with its calendars of martyrs including names
of slaves, it was not possible for the Church
really to accept the view that slaves were not
persons as well as other Christians. Yet it
* See " Antiquities," book xvi. sect. iii.
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 91
was a very long and gradual process before the
Christian spirit overcame the prejudices of
Imperial society. A Gallic council in the sixth
century cancelled the marriages of slaves
which had been effected without the consent of
their masters, and refused the protection of
the Church to those slaves who sought it with
a view to marriage.
Even more alien from modern sentiment was
the attitude of the Church towards the marriages
of slaves and free persons. The severe laws on
the subject were acquiesced in, and it is hard
to demonstrate any ameliorative effects from
the association of Church and State. The
most we can hope to make out is that the influ
ence of Christianity was a humanising factor
in the life of the time, stimulating the tendency
towards manumission of slaves, restraining the
worst abuses of power, and softening the hard
ships of servile life.
In the society of the Empire a rapid process
of disintegiation had gone far to destroy the
rigid subordination of the female sex, and, to
92 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
quote the words of Sir Henry Maine, " the
situation of the Roman female, whether
married or unmarried, became one of great
personal and proprietary independence." He
continues :
" But Christianity tended somewhat from the very
first to narrow this remarkable liberty. Led at first by
justifiable disrelish for the loose practices of the decaying
heathen world, but afterwards hurried on by a passion
of asceticism, the professors of the new faith looked with
disfavour on a marital tie which was in fact the laxest
the Western world has seen. The latest Roman law,
so far as it is touched by the Constitutions of the Christian
emperors, bears some marks of a reaction against the
liberal doctrines of the great Antonine jurisconsults." *
Justinian, acting under the influence of the
Church, so far abandoned the old contractual
notion of marriage, which prevailed in the
Roman law, as to prohibit divorce by mutual
consent, but his legislation in this particular
was beyond the endurance of his subj ects. His
successor, Justin, repealed his prohibitions in
deference to the popular wishes. With the
downfall of the Empire in the West, and the
* See "Ancient Law," p. 156, Tenth Edition.
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 93
great increase of ecclesiastical power, which
was not the least consequence of that downfall,
a new chapter may be said to open in the
history of Christian marriage.
III. — Without pressing unduly the state
ments of Tacitus, we may allow that the
German tribes which assaulted the frontiers,
and finally conquered the territories, of the
Roman Empire, brought with them a respect
for the female sex, which had no counterpart
in the corrupt society which they entered.
This natural sentiment allied itself with the
theological tendency to exalt the position of
the Virgin Mary in the system of Christian
thought and worship.
It is agreed by all students that the cultus of
the Virgin in its turn affected the position of
women. Female chastity was invested with
an almost superhuman majesty in the eyes
of the Teutonic converts, and the extra
ordinary fervour for monastic life which they
manifested was the direct consequence.
Guizot is probably right in ascribing^ much
94 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
importance to what he calls " the feudal
family."
" The feudal family . . . lived separated from the
rest of the population, shut up in the castle. The
colonists and serfs made no part of it; the origin of the
members of this society was different, the inequality of
their situation immense. Five or six individuals in a
situation at once superior to and estranged from the rest
of the society, that was the feudal family. It was, of
course, invested with a peculiar character. It was
narrow, concentrated, and constantly called upon to
defend itself against, to distrust, and, at least, to isolate
itself from, even its retainers. The interior life, domestic
manners, were sure to become predominant in such a
system. . . . Domestic life necessarily, therefore, ac
quired great sway. Proofs of this abound. Was it not
within the bosom of the feudal family that the import
ance of women developed itself? " *
Chivalry was in its origin as much aristo
cratic as religious; the poetry of sex began
within the narrow confines of a small heredi
tary class, and from thence exerted its human
ising influence over wider and always widening
circles of social life. Precisely in the same
way did the political liberties of the modern
world develop. First the reign of privilege
* See " History of Civilisation," vol. i. p. 71.
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 95
and the bracing conflicts in defence of
privilege against aggressive powers; then
the development of doctrines of human
rights in the course of the conflicts, and
the practical necessity of association in de
fence of those rights. Finally, the extension
of the doctrines over the whole area of civic
life.
The German spirit was intensely individual
istic, domestic, aristocratic, sentimental; and
when it passed under the discipline of Christi
anity, it received a truly amazing exaltation,
which has left its mark on the politics,
literature, and art of modern Europe, and
perhaps most remarkably on the conceptions
of family life which now prevail among us.
Moreover, while Imperial society had been
pre-eminently urban, German life was pre
eminently rural. The town is the natural
enemy of the home ; the country is the natural
sphere of the family. Thus the habits and the
circumstances of the conquerors of the Roman
empire co-operated with the other forces of
96 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
the time to develop among them a lofty
doctrine of marriage.
IV. — We have said that the downfall of the
Roman Empire brought as one of its conse
quences a great increase of ecclesiastical power.
The famous description of the Papacy as "the
ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned on
the tomb thereof " is as true as it is eloquent.
To the barbarian races who settled within the
Empire the Popes of Rome seemed to succeed
to the prestige and authority of the Augusti.
To the suffering populations, who had been
reduced to servitude by the conquerors, the
Popes appeared as champions and protectors.
They earned their supremacy by their services
alike to the Germans, whom they brought
within the pale of the Church, and to the
provincials, for whom they kept alive the
saving traditions of civilisation. The religion
and the law of the Empire persisted through
the great catastrophe, but both underwent a
transformation.
Mediaeval Christianity and the Canon Law
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 97
were the result of the new circumstances under
which the imperial legacy of civilisation,
ecclesiastical and civil, was accepted and
developed in the West. The faith and morals
of the Gospel had to be presented intelligibly
to uncivilised nations, and a system of
ecclesiastical discipline strong enough to bring
barbarians under control had to be created.
This is the explanation and the excuse of the
two grand features of mediaeval Christianity,
the Papacy and the Monastic system. Every
thing was materialised. The clergy became
priests; the spiritual claim of the hierarchy
became a frankly political claim to secular
supremacy. The sacraments became means
of grace in the most literal sense of the phrase,
conveying their supernatural gift apart from
the moral condition of the recipient. A spirit
of systematic and mechanical sacramentalism
penetrated every part of the religious system,
that is, every part of the whole scheme of
human life, for the Church gathered all things
within its scope.
98 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
Marriage necessarily passed under this
governing tendency. It became in the hands
of the mediaeval moralists a sacrament, one
of the Seven Sacraments ; all its incidents were
frankly subject to ecclesiastical control; it
was declared to be absolutely indissoluble;
divorce from the bond of marriage was totally
prohibited. A theory of marriage was ex
pressed in the canons, which reflected the
ideal of sacerdotalist thinkers rather than the
wisdom of practical statesmen. This theory
was formally and finally bound on the Roman
Church by the Council of Trent. The con
tractual and personal aspects of marriage are
completely subordinated to the ecclesiastical.
The State and the individual are overridden
by the Church. The Imperial element and
the Teutonic element are absorbed by the
ecclesiastical. In the Catechism of the
Tridentine Council it is actually laid down that
the presence of a priest is indispensable for the
validity of a Christian marriage.
Such theoretical rigidity is not for this world.
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 99
The mediaeval Church soon found itself com
pelled to tolerate much that violated its exalted
doctrine. A vast system of ecclesiastical
dispensations was elaborated, by means of
which a working harmony was effected
between an unyielding theory and a lax
practice. Bishop Creighton did not speak
excessively when he described the mediaeval
system as " a mass of fictions or dispensations
and subterfuges." Perhaps there was an
element of fitness in the fact that the English
Reformation had its first occasion in a matri
monial conflict, for in no part of the ecclesi
astical system was the discrepancy between
the official doctrine and the official practice
more sharply exhibited.
CHAPTER V
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION ON MARRIAGE
IT has been already pointed out that in the
course of the Middle Ages marriage had " lost
its civil character/' and become altogether part
of the ecclesiastical system. It was one of
the Seven Sacraments, and as such possessed
the " indelible character." Divorce with
liberty of re-marriage was altogether pro
hibited. This rigorous law was quite beyond
human endurance, and the Church had to
provide the mitigations of its own theory.
These were provided in the elaborate system
of dispensations, by means of which unhappy
and impolitic marriages were, on one pretext
or another, nullified, and many unions, pro
hibited by the canons, were made possible.
The exaltation of the papal power was
materially helped forward by the public
100
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION 101
demand for dispensations, and the strongest
possible impetus was given to their issue by
the enormous wealth which they brought into
the papal exchequer.
But with the money there entered into the
system the most demoralising influence in the
world. Dispensations were easily granted to
the wealthy, hard to obtain for the poor.
All the evidence available demonstrates that
the marriage system, with its rigorous theory
and numerous dispensations, had come to
work so badly, that in every part of
Christendom men's consciences were restive.
It was inevitable that the Reformation would
make its influence felt in the law and practice
of marriage.
In the year 1520 Luther put forth from the
press the book entitled " On the Babylonian
Captivity of the Church" In this work he
discusses the different parts of the Christian
system, and shows how they have been
mishandled and depraved under the rule of
the Papacy. In the section treating of
102 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
matrimony he begins by denying that marriage
is properly to be described or regarded as a
sacrament.
" Since matrimony has existed from the beginning of
the world, and still continues even among unbelievers,
there are no reasons why it should be called a sacrament
of the new law and of the Church alone. The mar
riages of the patriarchs were not less sacred than ours,
nor are those of unbelievers less real than those of
believers; and yet no one calls them a sacrament.
Moreover, there are among believers wicked husbands
and wives worse than any Gentiles. Why should we
then say there is a sacrament here and not among the
Gentiles? "
He points out the ignorant misunderstand
ing of St. Paul's language, which enabled the
traditionalists to pretend that marriage was
styled a sacrament in the Scripture. Then he
passes from the ecclesiastical theory to the
actual working of the system :
" What shall we say of those impious human laws by
which this divinely appointed manner of life has been
entangled and tossed up and down? Good God! it is
horrible to look upon the temerity of the tyrants of
Rome, who thus, according to their own caprices, at
one time annul marriages and at another time enforce
them. Is the human race given over to their caprice
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION 103
for nothing but to be mocked and abused in every way,
and that these men may do what they please with it for
the sake of their own fatal gains? ... I rejoice, how
ever, that these disgraceful laws have at length attained
the glory they deserve, in that by their aid the men of
Rome have nowadays become common traders. And
what do they sell? The shame of men and women, a
merchandise worthy of these traffickers, who surpass all
that is most sordid and disgusting in their avarice and
impiety. There is not one of those impediments which
cannot be removed at the intercession of mammon, so
that these laws seem to have been made for no other
purpose than to be nets for money and snares for souls
in the hands of those greedy and rapacious Nimrods,
and in order that we might see in the holy place, in the
Church of God, the abomination of the public sale of
the shame and ignominy of both sexes. A business, alas !
worthy of our pontiffs, and fit to be carried on by men
who, with the utmost disgrace and baseness, are given
over to a reprobate mind, instead of that ministry of the
Gospel which, in their avarice and ambition, they despise."
Luther regarded himself as defending the
divine institution of marriage against the
interested laxity of the Popes:
" The union of husband and wife is one of divine right,
and holds good, however much against the laws of men
it may have taken place, and the laws of men ought to
give place to it without any scruple. For if a man is
to leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife,
how much more ought he to tread under foot the frivolous
104 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
and unjust laws of men, that he may cleave to his wife?
If the Pope, or any bishop or official, dissolves any mar
riage, because it has been contracted contrary to the
papal laws, he is guilty of treason against God, because
this sentence stands: ' Whom God hath joined together,
let not man put asunder.' '
He effectively demolishes the ecclesiastical
doctrine as to " fanciful spiritual affinities,"
and asks unanswerably whether the Christian
man is not the " brother " of the Christian
woman, so that on the principle that spiritual
relationship is to determine lawfulness of
marriage, no marriage between Christians
could ever be permissible. Throughout Luther
writes in a spirit of practical good sense which
makes short work of the artificial teaching
which had been elaborated by the canonists,
and brings the whole subject on to the plane
of average everyday life.
It is to be noted that the Saxon reformer did
not stand alone in taking up this ground against
the papal system. The mediaeval Church did
not appear to those who revolted against it as
the champion of marriage, but as precisely
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION 105
the contrary, and this in spite of the rigorous
doctrine established by the canonists, and
affirmed by the Council of Trent. The dispen
sation system was in the eyes of Protestants the
root of endless evil. That " where a doctrine
fails it can be supplied by the Pope's power "
led in practice to general demoralisation and
the rule of the purse. Nearly one hundred and
fifty years after Luther published his treatise
on the " Babylonian Captivity of the Church/'
Jeremy Taylor wrote with just severity of the
current Roman casuistry that its doctrines
" legitimate adulterous and incestuous marriages, and
disannul lawful contracts: they give leave to a spouse
to break his or her vow and promise ; and to children to
disobey their parents, and, perhaps, to break their
mother's heart, or to undo a family. No words can bind
your faith, because you can be dispensed with; and if
you swear you will not procure a dispensation, you can
as well be dispensed with for that perjury as the other;
and you cannot be tied so fast but the pope can unloose
you. So that there is no certainty in your promise to
God, or faith to men; in judicatories to magistrates, or
in contracts with merchants; in the duty of children
to their parents, of husbands to their wives, or wives to
their contracted husbands; of a catholic to a heretic;
and last of all, a subject to his prince cannot be bound
106 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
so strictly, but if the prince be not of the pope's per
suasion, or be by him judged a tyrant, his subjects shall
owe him no obedience." *
There was unquestionably large justification
for such language, yet we cannot but perceive
that it fails to do substantial justice to the
system it so severely condemns. The ambition
and greed of the popes were no doubt factors
in the development of the dispensation system
which the reformers repudiated, but they were
not the dominant factors. Allowance must
be made for the standing problem of ecclesi
astical administration, viz.: how to reconcile
a divine, and therefore an unyielding, law to
the infinite and bewildering eccentricities of
human action. Very soon Luther had to
realise in a very humiliating and unfortunate
experience the difficulties of that problem.
The story of Luther's condemnation of
bigamy in a special case is thus given by
Professor Lindsay in his admirable history
of the Reformation :
* See "A Dissuasive from Popery," Works, ed. Heber vol. x.
p. 252.
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION 107
" Philip (Landgrave of Hesse) had married when barely
nineteen a daughter of Duke George of Saxony. Latterly,
he declared that it was impossible to maintain conjugal
relations with her; that continence was impossible for
him; that the condition in which he found himself
harassed his whole life, and prevented him coming to
the Lord's Table. In a case like his, Pope Clement VII.
only a few years previously, had permitted the husband
to take a second wife, and why should not the Protestant
divines permit him? He prepared a case for himself
which he submitted to the theologians, and got a reply
signed by Bucer, Melancthon and Luther, which may
be thus summarised: —
According to the original commandment of God,
marriage is between one man and one woman, and the
twain shall become one flesh, and this original precept
has been confirmed by our Lord; but sin brought it
about that first Lamech, then the heathen, and then
Abraham, took more than one wife, and this was per
mitted by the law. We are now living under the gospel,
which does not give prescribed rules for the regulation
of the external life, and it has not expressly prohibited
bigamy. The existing law of the land has gone back
to the original requirement of God, and the plain duty
of the pastorate is to insist on that original requirement
of God, and to denounce bigamy in every way. Never
theless the pastorate, in individual cases of the direst
need, and to prevent worse, may sanction bigamy in a
purely exceptional way; such a bigamous marriage is
a true marriage (the necessity being proved) in the sight
of God and of conscience; but it is not a true marriage,
with reference to public law or custom. Therefore such
a marriage ought to be kept secret, and the dispensa-
io8 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
tion which is given for it ought to be kept under the
seal of confession. If it be made known, the dispensa
tion becomes eo ipso invalid, and the marriage becomes
mere concubinage.'
" Such was the strange and scandalous document to
which Luther, Melancthon and Bucer appended their
names.
" Of course the thing could not be kept secret, and the
moral effect of the revelation was disastrous among
friends and foes." *
Professor Lindsay has convinced himself, by a
careful study of all the evidence, that in this
deplorable proceeding Luther was not actuated
by any unworthy motive, but led astray by his
inherited theory of the dispensing power of
the Church. " He thought honestly that the
Church did possess this power of dispensation
even to the length of tampering with a
fundamental law of Christian society, provided
it did not contradict a positive scriptural
commandment to the contrary. The crime
of the Curia, in his eyes, was not issuing dispen
sations in necessary cases, but in giving them in
cases without proved necessity, and for money''
* See " History of the Reformation," vol. i. p. 380.
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION 109
This melancholy episode is very illuminating.
It shows the difficulty into which the reformers
were brought by their repudiation of the
elaborate ecclesiastical machinery, which had
been slowly constructed to match the needs of
human nature and secure some application to
human life of the Christian law of marriage.
They were perforce driven back on the Scrip
ture, which they invested with the character
of a sufficient, infallible, and self-explanatory
rule of life. In these connections, where human
conduct in the relationships of society was
concerned, they found themselves drawn more
to the Old Testament than to the New. The
reason is plain enough. The New Testament
gave extremely little guidance in practical
matters, for most of the writings which it
contained were biographical, or theological,
or occasional; but the Old Testament con
tained in the earlier books the legislation of a
commonwealth, and to that extent covered
the ground of the abrogated canon law. The
reformers had little power of discrimination;
no CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
for the historical sense was as yet undeveloped,
and their exalted theory of the Bible as a whole
made all parts of it sacred and binding alike.
All this was not immediately favourable to
a high conception of marriage, for the standard
of the Old Testament is not a Christian
standard, and the sacramental doctrine of
the mediaeval Church marked a great advance
of Christian thought. There is something
almost pathetic in the conflict between their
Judaic standard provided by the Old Testa
ment, and their Christian spirit inspired by the
New.
When Fuller, following the plan of his quaint
treatise on " The Holy State," would find an
illustration for the guidance of Christian folk
of " the good husband," he selects the poly-
gamist Abraham, whose name stands in the
sacred record in more than one morally dubious
narrative. Fuller was neither a polygamist,
nor a slave-holder, nor a champion of incestu
ous liberty; but he had to use much wit and
some adroitness in order to keep out of view
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION in
all these characters of his pattern husband.
The tone of his counsels, moreover, is more
Jewish than Christian. Here is his description
of marital forbearance. The good husband,
he says, bears with his wife's infirmities:
" All hard using of her he detests; desiring therein to
do not what may be lawful, but fitting. And, grant her
to be of a servile nature, such as may be bettered by
beating; yet he remembers he hath enfranchised her by
marrying her. On her wedding-day she was, like St.
Paul, ' free-born,' and privileged from any servile
punishment."
Fuller, in selecting the patriarch as the model
husband, did but follow the example of the
Prayer-Book which proposes Sarah as the
model wife in the often-criticised paragraph
with which the homily in the marriage
service ends:
" For after this manner in the old time the holy women
also, who trusted in God, adorned themselves, being in
subjection to their own husbands; even as Sarah obeyed
Abraham, calling him lord; whose daughters ye are as
long as ye do well, and are not afraid with any amaze
ment."
In England a part of the ancient papal power
of issuing dispensations was reserved, and
H2 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
transferred by statute to the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and the mediaeval canons were
still held to govern the procedure of the
ecclesiastical courts, so far as they did not
contravene prerogative, custom, or statute.
The whole consequences of the breaking-up of
Christendom were only gradually perceived.
The evangelical principles, which the reformers
professed, expressed themselves in legislation
and practice slowly, and haltingly.
Three changes, however, were made at
the Reformation which had a beneficent effect
on the theory and practice of Christian
marriage. There were : I. The definite repudi
ation of ascetic views of human life; II. The
abrogation throughout the Protestant world
of the ascetic rule of clerical celibacy; III.
The exaltation and widely-extended circula
tion of the New Testament. To these changes
there may perhaps be added, though with
somewhat less confidence, the creation of the
modern State.
I. The opening paragraph of Lord Acton's
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION 113
lecture on the " Beginning of the Modern
State " will serve excellently to indicate
the nature of the change which passed
over Christendom when the mediaeval epoch
ended :
" Modern history tells how the last four hundred years
have modified the mediaeval conditions of life and
thought. In comparison with them, the Middle Ages
were the domain of stability, and continuity, and in
stinctive evolution, seldom interrupted by such origina
tors as Gregory VII. or St. Francis of Assisi. Ignorant
of history, they allowed themselves to be governed by
the unknown Past; ignorant of Science, they never
believed in hidden forces working onwards to a happier
future. The sense of decay was upon them, and each
generation seemed so inferior to the last, in ancient
wisdom and ancestral virtue, that they found comfort
in the assurance that the end of the world was at hand."*
In this state of feeling there could be no
free expansion of the human spirit; a dead
weight of self-conscious futility hung over life,
and the deeper natures felt its burden most.
Marriage is the climax and covenant of human
life, and it cannot take its due place in the
estimate of mankind, unless human life is
* See " Lectures on Modern History," p. 31.
n4 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
reckoned a grand and potent thing, full of
energy, promise and happiness.
Now, throughout the Middle Ages, marriage
was regarded by the best Christians of both
sexes as implying something short of the right
ful method of living. If one were indeed what
the Gospel called men to become, then one
would enter " religion," that is, become a
monk or nun. Archbishop Trench has rightly
offered this use of the word "religion" as an
example of words preserving a record of a
perversion of the moral sense. He says:
" We have a signal example of this, in the use, or
rather misuse, of the word ' religion,' during all the ages
of Papal domination in Europe. A ' religious ' person
did not mean any one who felt and allowed the bonds
that bound him to God and to his fellow-men, but one
who had taken peculiar vows upon him, a member of the
monkish orders ; a ' religious ' house did not mean, nor
does it now mean in the Church of Rome, a Christian
household, ordered in the fear of God, but a house in
which these persons were gathered together according
to the rule of some man. A ' religion ' meant not a
service of God, but a monastic order; and taking the
monastic vows was termed going into a ' religion.' What
a light does this one word so used throw on the entire
state of mind and habits of thought in those ages!
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION 115
That then was ' religion,' and nothing else was deserving
of the name ! And ' religious ' was a title which might
not be given to parents and children, husbands and
wives, men and women fulfilling faithfully and holily in
the world the .several duties of their stations, but only
to those who had devised such a self-chosen service for
themselves." *
This radically false conception of the mean
ing and value of human life was carried into
every household and neighbourhood by the
ubiquitous monastic system, and by the
multitudes of preaching friars. It is hard
for us now to realise the dominating place in
mediaeval Europe held by the monastic in
stitutions. At the dissolution of the
monasteries in England there had been
already a considerable reduction in the number,
but, even so, Henry VIII. 's Government dis
solved more than eight hundred houses, some
of them very small, but many of them splendid
and famous, f
Every Englishman grew up in the neigh-
* See " On the Study of Words," pp. 8, 9, Twelfth Edition,
f A complete list of English religious houses will be found
in Gasquet's "English Monastic Life," pp. 251-318.
n6 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
bourhood of some monastery, and a great
proportion of the people were connected with
the system either as members, or servants, or
tenants. Marriage was stamped with the
badge of moral inferiority; child-bearing was
wrapped up in a doctrine of hereditary sin;
the shadow of the Fall lay darkly on family
life. There was a suggestion of evil con
cupiscence in the joys of home. All this
ascetic sentiment was disallowed by the
Reformation. By an uprising of the genuine
human sentiments, too long suppressed by
the artificial disciplines of the mediaeval Church,
but in the Bible frankly recognised and con
secrated, the ill tradition was once for all
broken. Christian marriage could not but
benefit in the first place, and in the greatest
measure, from the change.
II. — In the same direction worked the
abrogation of the ascetic rule of clerical
celibacy. We have already spoken of the
immense mischiefs which followed to the
clergy from this rule, by bringing them into
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION 117
universal suspicion; but it is not only so
that mischief was caused. The clergy through
out the Middle Ages were to a very great extent
married, though against the law of the Church ;
and their unions, instead of being what they
have admittedly since become in every
Protestant country, a valuable moral force,
providing a model of Christian family life all
over the community, and associating family
life intimately with the profession of
Christianity, were looked upon as sinful,
winked at by authority in order to avoid worse
things, but none the less made the subject of
continual public denunciation. The moral
influence of the clergy was weakened, and the
marriage union was degraded by the notorious
and commonly witnessed discord between the
theory of the Church and the practice of its
representatives . *
Christianity itself has taken a humaner tone
as expounded by men who are themselves
* The evidence is collected and set out in Lea's " History of
Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church."
n8 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
husbands and fathers, and a close student of
theological literature will soon learn to recog
nise the notes of artificiality and lack of
sympathy which mark the work of unmarried
moralists. Lord Bacon must perhaps be
reckoned an advocate for clerical celibacy on
grounds of practical utility, but he admits
frankly enough the indurating tendency of the
single life. He says :
" Certainly, wife and children are a kind of discipline
of humanity ; and single men, though they be many times
more charitable because their means are less exhaust,
yet, on the other side, they are more cruel and hard
hearted (good to make severe inquisitors), because their
tenderness is not so oft called upon." *
Clerical marriage has disadvantages from
the point of view of ecclesiastical discipline
which are sufficiently obvious, but there can
be no doubt that few influences can be more
degrading on the whole conception of domestic
life in any community, than that the official
exponents of religion should be exiled
by reason of their sacred profession
* See "Essays," ed. Reynolds, p. 52.
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION 119
from the disciplines, sorrows, and joys of
home.
III. — The Reformation brought into general
knowledge. the life of Christ, and the writings
of the apostles. In this circumstance may be
recognised the most powerful of all the forces
which have tended to exalt the theory and
practice of Christian marriage. For when full
allowance has been made for ascetic elements
in the Apostolic teaching, for their mistaken
expectation that the world was about to end,
for the moral confusions of their hereditary
Judaism, it remains the case that the New
Testament, taken as a whole, is fatal to
asceticism, eminently favourable to all those
pure and gentle sentiments which most flourish
within the domestic sphere, and carries to the
individual, in the most moving and salutary
of its expressions, the spirit of Jesus Christ.
Experience would teach the reformers and
their followers that they could not find in the
Old Testament a code of Christian morals; in
due course the historical spirit would be
120 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
developed among students, and by its aid men
would come to read the sacred literature with
larger intelligence and a more discriminating
appreciation ; social science would have some
thing to say in aid of the statesmen, who
would succeed the canonists in the task of
regulating what must always be the chief of
all contracts, and the most socially important
of all institutions; but the New Testament
would only become the more evidently supreme
in the regard of Christians as time disallowed
all rivals.
It appears to be the fact that the morally
soundest family life within Christendom is to
be found precisely in those classes and sections
of society which most cherish and use the New
Testament. It is hard to conceive a greater
calamity to any Christian community than
that, for whatever reason, the New Testament
should fall out of the constant use and supreme
regard of the people. The Reformation
brought with it the translation of the Bible
into the vernacular languages of modern
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION 121
Europe, and its general diffusion among
the Protestant nations ; it gave also a powerful
stimulus to public education, and greatly
raised the standard of the general intelligence.
Thus the Bible came to a public able to read
and value it. In their hands that sacred
volume (and in this connection pre-eminently
what is said of the Bible must be understood
to apply to the New Testament) was a power
of moral discipline, cleansing and ordering life,
immensely more effective than the elaborate,
ubiquitous, always active machinery of
ecclesiastical authority.
To let the Bible be crowded out of public
knowledge by the inrush of newer claimants
is to wound the national morality in a vital
place. The New Testament has always been
the grand corrective of ecclesiastical aberra
tions, and the authoritative source of Christian
morals; in the Reformation it became the
manual of individual practice and the accepted
rule of family life, accepted not adequately of
course in practice, but universally in principle,
122 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
and over a large area of the national life of
Protestant societies, earnestly followed. Now
it is threatened, not with deliberate rejection,
for never were the tributes to its excellence so
many or so ardent, but threatened with the
silent contempt of universal neglect, with a
ceremonious exclusion from the public system
of national education, with a practical rejection
in the interest of a religious literature more
favourable to reviving clericalist ambitions.
Yet the New Testament remains the best of
all securities for the sanctity of marriage and
the purity of social life. Of the influence of
the modern State, which may be said in some
sense to have emerged at the Reformation, we
must speak in the next chapter, when it will be
necessary to draw into some agreement the
lines ol thought which have been pursued, and
to indicate the way of Christian duty with
regard to the vital interest of marriage under
the conditions of modern life.
CHAPTER VI
CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE UNDER MODERN
CONDITIONS OF LIFE
THE Reformation broke up the unity of
Western Christendom, and made impossible
the system of ecclesiastical government which
had been built up on the assumption of that
unity; but this was by no means all the change
it effected. Within the separated states of
Europe there was no longer any security for
religious agreement, and in point of fact the
Reformation inaugurated a long series of
domestic conflicts and devastating wars of
religion, which, after the interval of more than
a century, left the religious divisions, from
which they mainly arose, not only existing, but
deepened and stereotyped. Under these cir
cumstances it is clear that the national churches
which replaced the mediaeval Church were
123
124 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
doubly incompetent to retain control of a
matter so important, and in its effects so
wide-reaching, as marriage. They were not
of themselves strong enough to resist the
encroachments of civil authority; and, within
the State, they could not reckon on the
undivided support of the community. The
State, and the State alone, had power enough,
and a sufficiently undisputed title, to take
control of marriage.
Accordingly, in every modern community
we find that marriage is no longer a matter of
ecclesiastical regulation, but has its place in
the civil codes. Europe has in this respect
returned to the conditions of the prae-mediseval
epoch, when the vast fabric of the Roman
Empire remained unshattered. It is im
portant to bear in mind that the civil control
of marriage is no novelty of recent birth, but
an indispensable return to conditions which
obtained before the dominance of the Church
had been established. Ecclesiastical control
of marriage could not possibly survive the
UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS 125
dislocation of the ecclesiastical system, and
the weakening in men's minds of those sacra
mental and sacerdotal notions, which had
ruled the thought of Christendom for a
thousand years.
" Marriage is nothing but a civil contract/'
said Selden. " Tis true 'tis an ordinance of
God ; so is every other contract . God commands
me to keep it when I have made it." It is to
be remembered that the Reformation, in adding
greatly to the power of the State, did also
rescue the notion of the State from the un
worthy conceptions of the mediaeval canonists,
and asserted on its behalf a supremacy, based
on divine appointment, which secured for its
action a religious sanction, and commended
that action to the conscientious acceptance
of Christian folk. The State, however, clearly
acted with far more liberty than the Church,
and was compelled to take account of many
considerations which the Church could leave
out of reckoning. The State was not bound
by precedents as was the Church; and the
126 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
State had primarily to legislate for the social
welfare of the entire community, and not
for the presumed spiritual advantage of
individuals.
It needs no prolonged examination of the
circumstances under which the rival authori
ties necessarily acted to see that a wide
discrepancy of law and method would speedily
become apparent between them. The Church
in theory could not vary, for the law it applied
to human life claimed to be divine, and there
fore unalterable. The State, when it had
shaken off the ecclesiastical and Biblical
notions of its constitution, was necessarily
the reflection of the popular will, and by the
law of its own being forced to adapt itself to
the varying requirements of popular opinion.
To those who accept the claim of any
organised society of Christians to express with
plenary right the mind of Christ, it is clear
enough that this discrepancy between the
ecclesiastical and the civil handling of marriage
will appear nowise perplexing. They will
UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS 127
apprehend what is their duty without any
hesitation. The law of the Church — according
to their theory — holds their allegiance by
divine right ; they must obey God rather than
men. This simple and, to those who can
accept it, satisfactory solution of a difficult
problem will not be possible for the student of
social science, or of history, or of ecclesiastical
law. For he will be met at the start by the
unquestionable fact that all the assumptions
of that facile theory are unsound.
There is no institution now existing on the
earth which can make out a good title to the
character of the divinely-ordained exponent
of the mind of Christ; there is no agreement
between the churches on the subject of
marriage; the conditions of a sound political
treatment of the most important of all social
relationships are only now coming within the
range of human knowledge, as science, physio
logical and sociological, yields her witness.
It is plain enough that the task of determining
the way of duty for a Christian man is by no
128 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
means so easy as the zealots of the churches
pretend.
There are three aspects of marriage which
must always be taken into account by the
Christian citizen, and which are affected in
varying degrees and measures by his disciple-
ship. First of all, marriage is the fundamental
natural relationship; next, it is the most
important of social contracts; finally, it is
(for every Christian who marries as alone
Christians may rightly marry, " in the Lord ")
a holy estate entered by a divine vocation.
Of these three aspects the State is concerned
only with the first two ; the third has no mean
ing or importance outside the sphere of
Christian discipleship. The Church has no
special illumination with respect to the natural
or to the social aspects of marriage, but only
to the religious. The principles of Christ's
religion are indeed the right principles on which
natural and social relationships must be
controlled; but the application of those
principles is left to the decision of Christians,
UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS 129
associated and individual, to be made in the
light of experience as it is interpreted by the
Spirit of God.
Experience is a wide term ; it gathers within
itself all the accumulations of relevant know
ledge, as well as the specific warnings and
encouragements of history'. When the
Christian with the Gospel in hand aspires to
learn his duty here and now, he must assuredly
abandon the simple notion that he carries a
set of sufficient oracles which can meet all
the demands of the situation. He must never
fall so far from the whole meaning of disciple-
ship as to suppose that it gives him some short
and easy way out of political and social
difficulties. The Gospel does certainly give
him the point of view from which all such
difficulties must be regarded, and it assists his
vision of duty by the precepts and example of
Christ, but it leaves him as the rest of men to
learn practical wisdom in the stern school of
life.
If there be a discrepancy between the
130 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
traditional teaching of Christianity on the
subject of divorce and the laws of the modern
State, that is primd facie a reason for carefully
re-examining the traditional teaching of
Christianity: and it is this because the laws
of the modern State must be supposed to
represent the deliberate decisions of citizens
taken with full knowledge of all the circum
stances of society at the present time, and
therefore presumably expressing the latest
testimony of human experience.
It is not maintained that a careful re-
examination of Christian traditional teaching
will necessarily lead to an endorsement of the
legislation of the modern State; for it does
not admit of doubt that such legislation may
be determined by some wave of licentious
opinion sweeping across a community, and for
the moment carrying all before it, and the
traditional doctrine of Christianity, with which
it comes into opposition, may represent the
true conclusions of human experience. It may
do this, but it may not; and therefore the
UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS 131
argument is that in all cases there should be a
frank and thorough consideration of the
situation, to which the State is necessarily
required to address itself, before there is issued
a declaration of war between Church and
State.
On the subject of divorce there are some
excellent observations by Dr. Newman Smyth,
which may well be quoted here :
" Jesus undoubtedly laid down an absolute ethical
principle concerning the marriage relation in what he
was called to say in view of the loose divorce customs of
the Jews. That principle from which his precept pro
ceeded should be law in Christian ethics. Moreover,
the particular instance which was the only one considered
in Christ's declaration of the true principle of divorce,
required the simplest and most unequivocal assertion
of the sanctity of the obligation of marriage. For
adultery, the instance considered, is the direct breach
of the marriage relation. It is the one sin which immedi
ately and unmistakably illustrates the only valid reason
on which divorce, according to Christ's teaching, may
be legally allowed — the ground that the union between
husband and wife has already in fact been criminally
destroyed. There is no other legitimate principle for
divorce than that presented by the nature of the sin of
adultery. If, however, we can say with a good conscience
that some other sin (some sin which possibly in Christ's
132 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
day had not reached its full measure of iniquity — a sin,
for instance, like drunkenness, which may utterly destroy
the spiritual unity of a home and threaten even the
physical security of one of the persons bound by the
vows of marriage) is the moral equivalent of the cause
which our Lord had immediately before him for pro
nouncing divorce, shall we be justified in admitting it
to be likewise a proper Christian ground of divorce?
" Such is the question fairly stated upon which Chris
tian moralists have not been entirely agreed. Our
answer to it will depend very much on two considera
tions. The first will be our general habit of reading the
New Testament as another law, or of interpreting its
precepts to the best of our understanding in what we
may judge to have been the spirit in which they were
spoken, remembering the Master's own saying that his
words are spirit and they are life. The other considera
tion will be our confidence in the correctness of the
premise that the special sin alleged, by which the mar
riage union has been violated, is the moral equivalent
of adultery. In proportion as we are satisfied that it
is in its consequence as destructive of the possibility of
moral continuance in the married relation, we shall be
inclined to think that it is included under the supreme
principle which controlled the judgment of Jesus con
cerning certain habits, at which Moses winked, of the
easy putting away of a wife. In other words, we shall
argue that divorce for such other cause justifies itself
to the Christian conscience, because we are satisfied
that Jesus himself, if he were present and speaking to
the men of our times, in the same intent and spirit in
which he spoke of old, would pronounce this cause to be
as heinous as adultery in its destruction of the sacredness
UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS 133
of the marriage bond. The validity of this reasoning
will become further apparent when we recall the con
sideration already alluded to, that there are conditions,
other than adultery, in which the whole ethical and
spiritual truth of marriage is so destroyed that for the
innocent person to continue in the married state would
be abhorrent to all pure instincts, and would seem itself
to be like a participation in an adulterous relation." *
It would seem to be the case that Christi
anity under modern conditions must affect
marriage indirectly rather than directly. Take
for instance the natural relationship itself,
apart from legal and ecclesiastical regulation
altogether. It is an agreed point that the
essence of that natural relationship, that is,
ultimately, the moral validity of the marriage
covenant, depends upon the free, voluntary,
intelligent, deliberate consent of both the
parties. Now the meaning of all these ad
jectives will depend upon the standard of
individual self-respect which the parties to
the marriage accept.
Christianity ought certainly to have the
effect of cleansing and exalting the act of
* See " Christian Ethics," p. 413!, Third Edition.
134 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
consent, on which finally everything depends.
Indirectly the Gospel disallows those melan
choly unions which are planned by covetous or
ambitious parents for their children, into
which their children are hurried, often at a
scandalously early age, always under conditions
which render the notion of free, voluntary,
intelligent, deliberate consent absolutely
grotesque. These marriages, which profane
the sanctuary in the making, pollute society
in the unmaking. They are invalid from the
first.
Let it be observed that it has only been by
slow degrees that Christians have realised
the requirements of the Gospel in the matter
of personal independence. That the indis
pensable element in marriage should be, not
the consent of parents and guardians, though
that is rightly held to be important, but
the affectionate choice of the individuals them
selves, is a very modern, and by no means
even yet an universal, opinion. Assuredly,
however, it is the direct consequence of the
UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS 135
exaltation of individuality which is implied
in the religion of the Incarnation. Christi
anity brought into play the conscience of the
individual, and that conscience must determine
consent in Christian marriage. While thus
marriage has been exalted at the start it is
certainly the case that the whole conception
of what the marriage union ought to be has
been magnified by the Gospel.
When St. Chrysostom calls the Christian's
house a "little church" he does but utter
an inevitable reflection of Christian husbands
and wives. It needed no ecclesiastical pro
hibitions to make clear the unfitness of marriage
between persons who were not, in the deepest
concerns and interests of life, at agreement.
How could parental responsibility, raised
indefinitely by the conviction that Christian
children are " holy to the Lord," be happily
fulfilled in a divided household, where the
convictions underlying duty were not shared
by both parents, but by one of them were
denied and disregarded? What devout
136 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
Christian could " consent " to enter on the
marriage covenant with the assurance of that
fatal and continuing dissidence? How many
sad travesties of marriage would never have
taken place, how long a series of lamentable
scandals would have been avoided, if this
fundamental factor of " consent " had been
determined on Christian principles!
Similarly, when we pass from the natural
relationship pure and simple, and consider
the social relationship, which is the subject of
legal regulation, is it not clear that the indirect
influence of Christianity ought to be powerful
and beneficent. In so far as restrictions of
choice are determined by considerations of
social well-being they can command the
approbation of Christianity, which insists on
the duty of self-suppression in the general
interest.
The difficult questions which are now being
raised by the students of social science will
best be answered in an atmosphere of unselfish
ness. Ought marriage to be permitted be-
UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS 137
tween persons affected by certain forms of
disease? Ought the mentally infirm to be
permitted to marry? Ought intermarriage
between Europeans and negroes to be en
couraged, or even tolerated? These, and
many similar questions, are in debate; and
for their due answering they demand, not
only accurate knowledge of the relevant
facts, but also a self-suppressing temper of
mind, and a willingness on the part of
individuals to sacrifice their natural fran
chise to the clear interest of the public.
There is no rival to Christianity as a
power able to create the self-suppressing
temper.
Christian marriage ought to be plainly
recognisable as the true version of marriage,
that which most completely fulfils the natural
law of sexual relationship and brings to society
the greatest strength and enrichment. The
contribution which the Christian Church can
make to the advancement of the general life
and the guidance of the modern State is mainly
138 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
indirect. What the divine Founder said at
the first is nowhere more plainly illustrated.
" Ye are the light of the world: ye are the salt
of the earth." The Church is set to maintain
an ideal in the midst of human society, and
gradually, by the winning attractiveness of
that ideal, to draw society itself into harmony
and pursuit.
For the best of all reasons Christians, from
the very beginning of Christianity, have
consecrated the marriage union by solemn and
significant religious ceremonies. Marriage,
asking so much of the individuals, carrying so
rich a freight of blessings, and charged with
powers of such irretrievable misery, so noble
and in its^ perversions so degraded, gathering
into itself all that makes human life gentle,
chivalrous, serviceable, sublime, and by a
fatal and malignant Nemesis turning all
these graces into elements of infamy for
those who profane it, cannot be suffered
to lie outside the sanctions and aids of
Religion.
UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS 139
Marriage is either the most effective instru
ment through which the religion of Christ
bears upon mankind for good, or the most
pitiable revelation of its spiritual failure.
" It concerns all that enter into those golden
fetters to see that Christ and His Church be
in at every of its periods, and that it be entirely
conducted and overruled by religion." For
the understanding, and any measure of attain
ment, of this ideal of marriage, it is evident
that Christian discipleship must be pre-supposed
in the parties; but that pre-supposition can
not be made in the case of vast numbers of
people.
It follows, then, that the Christian ideal is
incapable as men are at present of being
universally imposed. The State must make
its legislation accord with the actual condition
of the citizens; and all that the Christian
citizen can rightly or reasonably attempt to
secure is that the action of the State shall
tend towards the gradual but continuous
raising of the national standard to the Christian
140 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
ideal. Christ did not disallow the reasoning
which had led the Lawgiver to tolerate a laxity
of divorce, which He Himself emphatically
condemned. He recognised " the hardness
of men's hearts/' that is, their crude and
rudimentary morals at an early stage
of social development, as a valid justifica
tion for the Mosaic permission of the Bill
of Divorcement.
By a sound analogy we may acquiesce in
a lower standard of the general law than
Christians for themselves can accept. But
our acquiescence in such a lower standard
itself constitutes a special reason why we
should the more jealously guard Christian
principles within the sphere of Christian
profession. So only can we fulfil the duty
which as Christian citizens we owe to the
nation and preserve inviolate our allegiance
to Christ.
It is the task of the Church, and it is within
the power of the Church, to create and sustain
a Christian atmosphere in the national life,
UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS 141
and to carry into the popular acceptance, by
continual affirmation, and far more by general
illustration, the principles of the Gospel. The
temptation of the Church under modern
conditions is to draw apart from the popular
life, repudiating its moral laxity, and marking
by a deep dividing line of artificial discipline
the frontiers of Christianity. It is both
unreasonable and unjust to yield to this
temptation.
The unreasonableness is sufficiently apparent
when it is remembered that the very reason of
the Church's existence is the moral regeneration
of mankind, and therefore that retirement
from the attempt to leaven with Christian
principles the general life implies nothing less
for the Church than self-stultification. The
injustice consists in the refusal to allow for
the novel situation which now confronts
statesmen. The mere scale of modern com
munities is itself a difficult and dismaying
circumstance, which adds immensely to the
perplexities of Government, but the wholly
142 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
unprecedented fact that these vast communities
are composed of independent citizens, educated
up to the level of understanding and insisting
upon their political rights, is even more
significant.
It is neither just nor reasonable for the
Church to ignore the conditions which, under
these circumstances, must determine political
action. It is vain to discuss the laws
of marriage and divorce apart from the
broad probabilities of their practical accept
ance.
When the moral control of nations resides
in sovereigns, or hierarchies, or in a ruling class
however designated, it is possible to impose
on the people a code of conduct which may
be far superior to their desires, but this
possibility no longer exists when the balance
of political power has shifted from individuals
and classes to the community itself. Then it
is quite futile to endeavour to establish a
higher standard of morals in the laws than
that which is already established in the
UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS 143
acceptance of the people. Laws, as Burke
said, follow manners, not manners laws, in
democracies.
Never in the history of mankind has there
been such a situation as exists to-day, a
situation in which the dream of the self-
forgetting legislator of Israel seems to be
taking practical shape and " all the Lord's
people are prophets," a situation which does
plainly lend itself to fearful departures from
righteousness, but none the less implies grander
possibilities of social excellence than any
hitherto accessible to the race. Everything
turns on the standard of sexual purity which
shall be accepted by the people; let that
be high, and the marriage law will, in the
very first place, reveal the fact; let it be
degraded, and the earliest victim to its
depraving influence will be the covenant of
marriage.
The Christian Church, then, is charged with
the most solemn and perplexing obligation,
viz. : to take frankly into consideration all the
144 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
circumstances which affect the national life
and determine the action of the State, and to
declare charitably and responsibly what shall
be the application of the principles of the
Gospel. The Church, in fulfilling this obliga
tion, will not act as in the past, when for a
hundred sufficient reasons the whole powers
of the society were delegated to its executive.
The clergy can no more be accepted as identical
with the Church; they must return to their
true position as servants and pastors of the
congregation, leaders of its worship, guardians
of its discipline, charged to fulfil in it the
ministry of the Word, having no lordship over
it or independence of it. The mind of the
Christian society must be expressed through
all the organs of expression which the Holy
Spirit is inspiring with utterance.
With the Gospel as the basis of fundamental
principle, the moral philosopher, the social
student, the physician, the physiologist must
come to some agreement as to the practi
cal demands of Christian discipleship, and
UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS 145
these demands, thus certified, all good
Christians must insist upon and, as far as
lies their power, establish in the laws of the
Empire.
The making of rules lies primarily with the
specially illuminated, but all members of the
Christian society, in all its sections, and under
all descriptions, are called to sustain in the
world the law of chastity, and to win men by
their example to acknowledge the beauty of
holiness. Within the Christian society itself
the evangelical ideal of marriage ought to be
affirmed and enforced, and the sacramental
character of the natural relationship vindicated
and displayed. Within the sphere of Christian
discipleship the sordid and cruel profanations
of the marriage covenant ought to be dis
allowed, and the cynical judgments they
provoke ought to be disproved:
" Marriage-making for the earth,
With gold so much — birth, power, repute so much,
Or beauty, youth so much, in lack of these! "
From the hallowed enclosure of the Church
K
146 CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
the sacred fire of domestic love, kindled from
the altar of divine love, shall be carried far
and wide into the world of human life, and
shall create everywhere the light and warmth
of home.
PRINTED BY CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED, LONDON, E.G.
85473
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